Behnegar. Leo Strauss's Confrontation With Weber

Leo Strauss's Confrontation with Max Weber: A Search for a Genuine Social ScienceAuthor(s): Nasser BehnegarSource: The Review of Politics, Vol. 59, No. 1 (Winter, 1997), pp. 97-125Published by: Cambridge University Press for the University of Notre Dame du lac on behalfof Review of PoliticsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1408119Accessed: 28/05/2010 13:21

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Leo Strauss's Confrontation with Max Weber: A Search for a

Genuine Social Science Nasser Behnegar

An analysis of Leo Strauss's difficult and relatively neglected criticism of Max Weber in Natural Right and History reveals the fundamental difficulties that political science, and social science more generally, must overcome in order to be a genuine science. In Strauss's view, the inadequacy of the fact-value distinction, which is now widely acknowledged, compels a re-examination of Weber's denial of the possibility of valid knowledge of values. Strauss identifies the serious ground of this denial as Weber's insight that modem philosophy or science cannot refute religion. Believing that philosophy or science cannot ultimately give an account of itself that meets the challenge of religion, Weber maintained a "tragic" view of the human situation. Strauss also expresses profound doubt about the possibility of philosophy or science, but ultimately he suggests that a certain kind of study of the history of political philosophy might resolve the conflict between philosophy and divine revelation, and, therewith, the "value problem."

"Confrontation is genuine criticism. It is the supreme way, the only way, to a true estimation of a thinker. In confrontation we undertake to reflect on his thinking and to trace it in its effective force, not in its weakness. To what purpose? In order that through the confrontation we ourselves may becomefree for the supreme exertion of thinking."'

Leo Strauss's essay on Weber in Natural Right and History2 was an "event" because it was a thoroughgoing criticism of a man who was an intellectual hero to a generation of social scientists, a thinker whose reflections on science guided their understanding of the meaning and limits of their enterprise. Today, however, with the intellectual victory of historicism over

This study was completed during a postdoctoral fellowship at The Symposium on Science, Reason, and Modern Democracy in the Political Science Department of Michigan State University. I am grateful to the directors of The Symposium and to numerous colleagues, especially Alice Behnegar, Jerry Weinberger, and Richard Zinman.

1. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: The Will to Power as Art. trans. David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 4-5, emphasis added.

2. Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1950). All unspecified references in the text are to this work.

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positivism, a victory which Strauss anticipated,3 the problematic character of Weber's distinction between facts and values has become more generally recognized. It would appear that despite the growing interest in Strauss's criticism of the late modern thinkers, his interpretation of Weber is a matter of only historical interest. Yet Weber's more fundamental belief was in the impossibility of a genuine knowledge of values, and this belief has not only survived but also has gained more and more adherents. Nevertheless, those who neither pretend to know how to resolve the conflict between ultimate values, nor believe that ignorance, and especially ignorance of the most important matters, is bliss, cannot help but be interested in examining the ground of this belief. In other words, if Weber is right, as I believe he is, that given the impossibility of genuine knowledge of values only the distinction between facts and values can preserve social science, and if Weber's critics are right, as I believe they are, that the distinction between facts and values is untenable, those who still wish for a genuine political science are compelled to reexamine the basis of the denial of the possibility of a genuine knowledge of values, that is, of scientific ethics.

We begin our search for a genuine political science by re- minding ourselves of the gulf that separates contemporary political theorists from contemporary political scientists, a gulf which was partly caused by the debate between behavioralism and post-behavioralism but which has survived that debate. As indicated by the one's emphasis on political action and the other's emphasis on scientific research, the conflict between political theory and political science is partly a modification of the older and more fundamental antagonism between politics and philosophy or science understood as a contemplative pursuit.4 This

3. "Positivism necessarily transforms itself into historicism" (Leo Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959], p. 26). According to Strauss, positivistic political science is inferior to historicism in every respect except one: it has the merit of asserting, though in an inadequate manner, "the notion of the one truth, or as it would probably prefer to call it, of objectivity" ("The Crisis of Political Theory," in The Predicament of Modem Politics, ed. Harold J. Spaeth [Detroit: University of Detroit Press, 1964], p. 92).

4. David Easton, "The New Revolution in Political Science," American Political Science Review 63 (1969): 1061, 1051, 1055; S. Wolin, "Political Theory as a Vocation," American Political Science Review 63 (1969).

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LEO STRAUSS AND MAX WEBER

latter antagonism was blurred by the Enlightenment hope that social science could solve our social and political problems by discovering the laws of nature or history. But this hope was dashed, above all by Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Weber.

Indeed, Weber's methodological reflections were animated from the beginning by a disquieting awareness that the demand that political science should serve our practical needs may not be compatible with the requirement that it should do so by scientific means, which include philosophical inquiry: as neither empirical science nor rational philosophy can legitimately validate value judgments, neither can serve our deepest practical needs.5 Yet Weber's own attempt to meet both the demands of science and the demands of politics again obscured the tension between them, for it contributed to the founding of an instrumental social science capable of serving any government or social order. In his criticism of Weber's social science, Strauss not only once again exposes this tension but also articulates its fundamental form.

According to Strauss, the politicization of philosophy began in the seventeenth century, when, being moved by a concern for healthy politics, philosophy abandoned its "humanizing quest for the eternal order" and became a weapon against religion (p. 34). Weber clearly saw the grave consequence of this polemic. In his account, although atheism is the basic premise of modern science and thereby of modern culture (our culture minus the surviving remnants of the older traditions),6 moder science is unable to demonstrate its superiority to religion. To be sure, science viewed by itself is internally consistent, but so are poetry and piety: "It is equally legitimate to will or not to will the truth,

5. Max Weber, Max Weber on the Methodology of Social Sciences, ed. and trans. Edward Shils and Henry Finch (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1949), pp. 18-19, 50-51 [hereafter MSS]; "'Wissenshaft' is a far more inclusive term than 'science.' Strauss's translation, 'philosophy or science,' correctly brings out the point that Weber's negative thesis-the denial of ultimate rationality to all moral and political choices-is far more sweeping than the slogan 'value-free science' indicates" (S. P. Turner and R. A. Factor, Max Weber and the Dispute over Reason and Value: A Study in Philosophy, Ethics, and Politics [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984], p. 183).

6. "That science today is irreligious no one will doubt in his innermost being, even if he will not admit it to himself" (Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills [New York: Oxford University Press, 1946], p. 142 [hereafter MWES]).

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or to reject truth in favor of the beautiful and the sacred" (p. 48). Since "something may be true although it is not beautiful and not holy,"7 a scientist qua scientist must resist the charm of the beautiful and the call of the holy. This resistance and indeed rejection cannot be based on scientific grounds, for it is rationally permissible to reject truth in favor of the beautiful and the sacred. It must be simply a decision, but as such it is a form of dogmatism in the sense of the acceptance of unevident opinion, and thus it contradicts the essence of science. This difficulty, according to Strauss, is the deepest reason for the twentieth-century crisis of science,8 a crisis which Weber could not successfully resolve. Strauss's interpretation of Weber thus seeks to show the fundamental difficulties that political science has to overcome in order to become a nondogmatic or genuine science.

Formidable obstacles stand in the way of understanding Strauss's interpretation of Weber. The essay is one of Strauss's better known works, yet, as Robert Eden has observed, "so far as the public traces tell, no one [except Turner and Factor] has so much as outlined the main steps" of its argument; Strauss's critique "has been ignored rather than rebutted by social scientists."9 This is not perhaps surprising. Strauss's interpretation of Weber is significant for the suggestion that modem science, which prides itself on liberating man from the shackles of tradition, is dogmatic at its core, that is, for the suggestion of a flaw which is least suspected by modern man and most troubling once suspected.1 The very radicalness of Strauss's thought causes an uneasiness that is easier felt than understood. Accordingly, it is

7. MWES, p. 148; Max Weber, Roscher and Knies: The Logical Problems of Historical Economics, trans. Guy Oakes (New York: Free Press, 1975), p. 116.

8. An Introduction to Political Philosophy, ed. Hilail Gildin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), pp. 309-10.

9. Robert Eden, "Why Wasn't Weber a Nihilist?," in The Crisis of Liberal Democracy: a Straussian perspective, ed. Kenneth L. Deutsch and Walter Soffer (New York: State University of New York Press, 1987), p. 212; "Weber and Nietzsche: Questioning the Liberation of Social Sciences from Historicism," in Max Weber and his Contemporaries, ed. Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Juergen Osterhammel (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987), p. 418.

10. It would of course be foolish to take Strauss's conclusion for granted. There are, however, in principle only two legitimate responses: one must either show that modem science does not reject revelation or show that its rejection of revelation is based on sufficient reasons.

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tempting to dismiss him by questioning his intention or by making him fit into the contemporary stereotypes of classical thought. Thus, Strauss's criticism of dogmatic atheism has been confused with a criticism of atheism as such, and even with the preparation of an inquisition.1 His rejection of absolutism and doctrinairism and his support for Socratic skepticism (pp. 21-22, 125-26, 162- 63,192-93, 277,320-21) has been ignored, apparently in the belief that anyone who questions liberal relativism on ancient principles must be an absolutist.12 Since Strauss challenges the contemporary frame of reference, to follow his interpretation of Weber we must, at least provisionally, be willing to step out of our frame of reference and our presuppositions about classical political philosophy.13

Moreover, Strauss's search for a nondogmatic social science led him to write in a way that can easily be misunderstood. His judgment that it is at best worthless to accept philosophic truths without working through for oneself the reasoning that supports them led him to have a distaste for "the cheap sale of the formulations of truth."'4 For this reason as well as others that I will discuss later, Strauss came to appreciate a mode of writing which violated the ordinary standards of good writing: "what is beautifully and methodically written, is not beautifully and methodically written."'5 He chose to write dialectically: what he says in one place is often a provisional statement that he consciously contradicts or refines elsewhere. Similarly, his most emphatic contentions are not always his final or deepest arguments.'6 Even Raymond Aron and Karl Lowith, who were

11. John H. Schaar and Sheldon S. Wolin, "Review Essay: Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics: A Critique," American Political Science Review 57 (1963): 125-50.

12. Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, trans. Michael S. Steinberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 427.

13. Christopher Bruell's discussion of the contemporary obstacles to understanding Plato is especially useful for this task. "On Reading Plato Today," in Political Philosophy and the Human Soul: Essays in Memory of Allan Bloom, ed. Michael Palmer and Thomas Pangle. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995), pp. 95-108.

14. Leo Strauss,"The Spirit of Sparta or the Taste of Xenophon,"Social Research (6) 1939: 535.

15. Xenophon Cynegeticus 13.6 quoted in Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), p. 29n.

16. Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, p. 147.

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intellectually close to and personally familiar with Strauss, at times have not followed the dialectical character of Strauss's essay on Weber: Strauss's articulation of the reasons why social science should not take seriously the objections made on the basis of divine revelation (p. 71) led Lowith to conclude that Strauss regarded the areligious understanding of lived human relationships as evidently legitimate.17 This conclusion ignores Strauss's later statements that show that science cannot disregard the challenge of divine revelation (pp. 71-73, 74-76). Similarly, Strauss's emphatic statement that he seeks to demonstrate the nihilistic consequence of Weber's thesis (p. 49) led Aron to ignore Strauss's less emphatic suggestion that his main aim is not to reduce Weber to nihilism (p. 62).18 The combination of the radicalness of Strauss's thought and the dialectical character of his writing makes it extremely difficult to follow Strauss's individual arguments, not to mention the more comprehensive and serpentine argument that builds on these.

In interpreting Strauss's interpretation of Weber, I am thus compelled to undertake a certain amount of commentary. I focus on the passages that are most likely to be misunderstood and in particular on the significance of the different arguments and their connection to the central argument of the essay. The first section of this article, on Strauss's preliminary criticisms, has a threefold argument. First, I explain the significance and limitation of Strauss's polemical rhetoric. Second, I show how Strauss demonstrates that Weber's value-free social science is not based on the distinction between the Is and the Ought but on the thesis that there cannot be any genuine knowledge of the Ought. Third, I argue that Strauss's demonstration of the adverse practical and theoretical consequences of this thesis was not meant to be a refutation of the thesis but a preparation for understanding it. In the second section, on the basis of Weber's position, I show how Strauss demonstrates that Weber's denial of the possibility of "objective" knowledge of the Ought is based not on a positivistic faith in empirical science, but on the premise that the conflict

17. Karl Lowith, "Max Weber's Position on Science," in Max Weber's Science as a Vocation, ed. Peter Lassman, Irving Velody and Hermino Martins (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), p. 153.

18. Raymond Aron, History, Truth, Liberty: Selected Writings of Raymond Aron, ed. Franciszek Draus (Chicago: University of Chicago press, 1985), p. 354.

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between ultimate values is irreconcilable, a premise rooted in the crisis of modern this-worldly life and ultimately in Weber's realization of the difficulty of grounding a genuinely scientific social science in the face of the challenge posed by religion. In the third and final section, on the problem of political science, I discuss how the conflict between science and revelation is relevant to the contemporary situation and is connected with the conflict between science and politics, and I indicate how the rest of Natural Right and History is an attempt to resolve these conflicts.

The Preliminary Criticisms

Immediately prior to his discussion of Weber, Strauss presents himself as a critic of the politicization of philosophy, that is, of its transformation into a weapon and instrument, and as a supporter of the older notion of philosophy as the unpolemical search for permanent truths (p. 34). Yet Strauss's interpretation of Weber in the second chapter of Natural Right and History seems very polemical. As Richard Kennington observes, this is "the only chapter in which Strauss permits irony to pass over into jest and ridicule."19 Although Strauss's interpretations of Plato, for example, focus exclusively on Plato's thought and not on Platonism, his discussion of Weber is guided at least in part by the absorption of Weber's doctrine by "present-day social science" (p. 49). Indeed, Strauss's jest and ridicule are reserved largely, though not exclusively, for this science (p. 49, 52-53). Strauss's criticism of Weber seems then to be part of his polemic against contemporary social science. The polemical character of Strauss's work seems to support the view that the opponents of the politicization of science also engage in a politicized activity. But the case of Strauss is more complicated. As Kennington also observes, in the same essay Strauss sharpens a seemingly devastating criticism of philosophy that was latent in Weber and does not even attempt to answer this criticism.20 What kind of a polemicist goes "out of his way" to strengthen objections to his own position?

19. Richard Kennington, "Strauss's Natural Right and History," Review of Metaphysics 35 (1981): 68.

20. Ibid., pp. 69-70.

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Strauss's rhetorical treatment of Weber, and of contemporary relativism in general, seems to be a conscious imitation of Plato's treatment of Thrasymachus, a rhetorician who argued that injustice is better than justice (p. 6).21 Plato's initial depiction of Thrasymachus as a wild beast and a hater of speeches tends to inspire a dislike, if not a hatred, of Thrasymachus. But Plato himself, Strauss argues, suggests that this depiction misrepresents Thrasymachus. He after all chose a vocation that dealt with speeches, and the enmity between him and Socrates was playful and not serious, at least according to Socrates.2 Plato's initial treatment of Thrasymachus is necessary, because "for all ordinary purposes we ought to loath people who act and speak like Thrasymachus and never to imitate their deeds and never to act according to their speeches."23 But "there are other purposes to be considered." For the understanding of justice and politics, "it is most important that we should not behave toward Thrasymachus as Thrasymachus behaves, that is, angrily, fanatically, or savagely."24 Strauss does not identify modern relativists with Thrasymachus, but it seems that his consideration of the practical consequences of the contemporary denial of natural right leads him to encourage a dislike of this denial. Accordingly, his criticism of relativism evokes the patriotic passions of its readers (pp. 1-2). He thereby, like Plato, employs Thrasymachean means, rhetorical devices that are "concerned with both arousing and appeasing the angry passions."25 But because his ultimate goal is to find the truth about morality he warns his readers of the "danger of pursuing a Socratic goal with the means, and the temper, of Thrasymachus" (p. 6). Strauss's polemical treatment of relativism accords with the view that "political philosophy deals with political matters in a manner that is meant to be relevant for political life." 26 Thus, in criticizing the politicization of philosophy he does not argue that philosophers did not have or should not have political agendas. Rather, the politicization of philosophy consists in blurring the difference between the needs of philosophy

21. Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), p. 74.

22. Plato Republic 411e; Strauss, The City and Man, pp. 74, 78, 84-85. 23. Strauss, The City and Man, p. 78. 24. Ibid., p. 74. 25. Ibid., p. 78. 26. Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy?, p. 10.

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and the needs of politics (p. 34): it manifests itself in the subordination of the search for the whole truth about fundamental problems to the advocacy of particular solutions to these problems, or more precisely, the subordination of the "awareness of the problematic character" of these solutions to the "subjective certainty" that they are sound.27

Strauss's polemic against relativism, however, is not based simply on practical considerations. According to Strauss, the extreme dangers or vices that face us are "absolutism" and "relativism." These vices are not merely moral but also theoretical, for they are two forms of dogmatism (p. 22). Both Plato and Aristotle "avoided the Scylla of 'absolutism' and the Charybdis of 'relativism"' (p. 162). By identifying relativism with Charybdis, Strauss suggests that he considers it to be the greater vice.28 He certainly considers it the vice that is most tempting to us today (p. 22). Following Aristotle's suggestion that we should prefer the vice that is less attractive to us, Strauss makes his criticism of relativism more pronounced than his criticism of absolutism. But his polemical criticism of relativism is provisional and subordinate to his ultimate aim of liberation from dogmatism of every kind.

With this understanding of Strauss's rhetoric in mind, I will show, in the rest of this section, how three of Strauss's criticisms of Weber that seem to be refutations of Weber serve the unpolemical purpose of clarifying Weber's thesis.

Strauss's discussion of Weber is based on the premise that the "true reason" for Weber's insistence on the ethically neutral character of social science was "his belief that there cannot be any genuine knowledge of the Ought" (p. 41). Strauss is aware that Weber himself had at times rejected this characterization of his position:

The issue is not really the question of the extent to which practical evaluations, in particular ethical ones, may claim for themselves normative dignity-in other words, whether they are different in character from, for instance, the often cited question whether blondes are preferable to brunettes or any other similarly subjective judgment of taste. These are problems of axiology (Wertphilosophie), not of the methodologies of empirical disciplines.29

27. Ibid., p. 116. 28. Homer The Odyssey XII 106-110. 29. MSS, p. 12.

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Weber rather insisted that what is at issue is the requirement, "utterly trivial in itself," that a researcher should keep separate statements of empirical facts and his own practical evaluations, because they involve different kinds of problems. But Strauss argues that the "conclusion from the radical heterogeneity of the Is and Ought to the impossibility of an evaluating social science is obviously not valid" (p. 41). This becomes evident if one assumes for the sake of argument that genuine knowledge of the ends is available. Since social science, as Weber admits, tries to find means for given ends, the knowledge of ends would guide social science, regardless of whether this knowledge were obtained in a different manner from the knowledge of the means: "Based on genuine knowledge of true ends, social science would search for the proper means to those ends; it would lead up to objective and specific value judgments regarding policies" (p. 41). Strauss points out the insufficiency of Weber's account of his position not to reject that position but rather to show the true reason underlying it, that is, "his belief that there cannot be any genuine knowledge of the Ought." Weber speaks not only of the logical distinction between questions of facts and questions of values but also, and at times even on the same page, of the irreconcilability of the conflicts between various value spheres. In "Science as a Vocation," he even concedes that the "deeper reason" for the impossibility of scientific pleading for practical stands is not the heterogeneity of the questions of facts and values but the irreconcilability of conflicts among various value spheres.30 Weber's social science is intelligible only if it is understood to rest on an axiological as opposed to a logical thesis.31

The important question now becomes whether Weber's view about the irreconcilability of values is true or false. But Strauss puts this question on hold and first discusses the normative (pp.

30. MWES, p. 147. 31. Although Strauss is known for his insistence that one should understand

a thinker as he understood himself, his work on Weber shows clearly that he does not believe that social science should confine itself to this approach, for otherwise the social scientist "would have to bow without murmur to the self-interpretation of his subjects" (pp. 55-56). This approach is merely preparatory: before judging or explaining a doctrine in sociological or other terms, one must understand it exactly as its originator understood it (p. 57). But if self-interpretations can be erroneous, understanding a thinker better than he understood himself may be the true understanding.

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42-49) and theoretical (pp. 49-62) consequences of Weber's view. To understand the purpose of these discussions, we must first understand their character and limitations. This is particularly important since most commentators have focused almost en- tirely on these discussions.32

The normative consequence of Weber's axiological thesis, Strauss argues, is nihilism. This of course does not mean that Weber advocated nihilism or even that the popular acceptance of his position leads to conscious nihilism, but only that his view of the irreconcilability of the conflicts among moral commands, cultural values, and vitalistic values (purely personal passions) logically leads to the view that every preference, as far as we can know, is as legitimate as any other.33 Now one may grant that Weber's theory of values leads to "decisionism," the view that one's actions rest on values that have no other support than one's decision to accept them, but this consequence is not altogether nihilistic for one may be obligated to act rationally once a value has been chosen.34 Strauss, however, suggests that the insistence on consistency and rationality is derived from moral commands or cultural values, and if it is permissible to prefer vitalistic values to moral commands and cultural values, it is permissible to abandon the concern for consistency and rationality (pp. 47-48). The nihilistic consequence of Weber's thesis, however, was obscured from him by his personal belief in the dignity of moral commands, which, according to Strauss, was "the residue of a tradition in which he was brought up," but which was at odds with his theory of values (pp. 43, 48).

32. Arnold Brecht, Political Theory: The Foundations of Twentieth-Century Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959); Ernest Nagel, The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961); H. H. Bruun, Science, Values, and Politics in Max Weber's Methodology (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1972).

33. Strauss's contention, therefore, is not refuted by Weber's alleged personal preference for the ethic of responsibility, for according to Weber's theory of values it is permissible to reject this ethic. Similarly, Brecht's contention that for Weber "values are unequal according to their different origins, implications, and consequences" contradicts Weber's discussion of syndicalism, which shows that these considerations are not decisive (Political Theory, p. 263; MWES, pp. 120-21). Regarding the consequences of the acceptance of this thesis by social science positivism, consider Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy?, p. 20.

34. Turner and Factor, Max Weber, p. 41.

l ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ I I II I I II l

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This criticism, once fully articulated, might appear to be a refutation of Weber's thesis. To show that a view leads to nihilism, particularly to those who have recently experienced the effects of nihilism as embodied in National Socialism, is to invite rejection of that thesis. Strauss makes full use of such sentiments by associating relativism with German thought and politics (pp. 1- 2). Yet he also warns his readers against the very temptations he dangles in front of them: "we must avoid the fallacy that in the last decades has frequently been used as a substitute for the reductio ad absurdum; the reductio ad Hitlerum. A view is not refuted by the fact that it happens to have been shared by Hitler" (42- 43).35 Just as "by proving that a certain view is indispensable for living well, ... one does not prove it to be true," so by proving that a certain view has harmful consequences, one does not prove it to be false (p. 6). Thus, by showing that Weber's thesis leads to nihilism Strauss merely clarifies Weber's thesis. He does not show that it is either true or false, and it is this latter concern that is most important for Strauss (pp. 6-7).

Strauss's third contention is that Weber's distinction between facts and values undermines the possibility of understanding social phenomena and thereby makes "social science as a purely theoretical pursuit" impossible. We cannot here discuss the content of this criticism other than to assert that its merit rests on the contention that one cannot understand the social world without a frame of reference, and implicit in every frame of reference are value judgments.36 We will only examine the

35. Guenther Roth's interpretation of this passage testifies to the strength of these temptations. He writes: "But Strauss is fair enough to denounce Reductio ad Hitlerum, the assertion that Weber's thinking led to fascism" (Reinhard Bendix and Guenther, Scholarship and Partisanship: Essays on Max Weber [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971], p. 64). Strauss, however, argues that even if Weber's thoughts led to fascism, one cannot dismiss them because they can still be true.

36. Weber's nice distinction between "value judgments" and "reference to values" is untenable, because "reference to values presupposes appreciation of values," and this appreciation "enables and forces the social scientist to evaluate the social phenomena" (p. 63). Erest Nagel sees the force of Strauss's criticism and therefore tries to defend value-free social science by making a distinction between "characterizing value judgments" and "appraising value judgments." He admits that science cannot dispense with "characterizing judgments," but he does not show why these judgments are more valid than appraising ones (Structure of Science, pp. 490-95).

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implications of Strauss's conclusion that social science as a theoretical pursuit is not possible without valid value judgments. Now, to show that Weber's thesis is incompatible with scientific social science is to invite the rejection of that thesis by those who believe that a truly scientific social science is the highest good (p. 49). But without prior reflection, one cannot assume, and Strauss certainly did not assume, that science is the highest court of judgment. Moreover, by showing that Weber's thesis leads to interpretive errors, one does not prove that one can avoid interpretive errors as such. One can avoid such errors only if one possesses a comprehensive frame of reference, that is, an adequate and universal hierarchy of questions. Frames of reference are determined by values, and therefore a comprehensive frame of reference is not possible without valid values. Strauss gives readers the impression at one point that valid value judgments are available to our "common sense" (pp. 52-53). Perhaps he may have thought that this impression is not misleading for those who have been in the grip of social science relativism, but he suggests that it is ultimately misleading. Although he argues that it is impossible to understand social phenomena "without being aware of the standard of judgment that is inherent in the situation and accepted as a matter of course by the actors themselves," he also argues that these standards are typically partial and inadequate (pp. 54,123-26). We need to understand the historical subjects as they understood themselves because the inadequate and contradictory opinions of historical actors point beyond themselves: their faulty frames of reference point to the comprehensive frame of reference (pp. 124-25). But does every opinion point beyond itself? In particular, does the idea of an omnipotent and mysterious God, which seems to be the basis of biblical morality, point beyond itself?

Strauss himself suggests that the preceding arguments do not refute Weber's thesis: "Almost all that we said up to this point was necessary in order to clear away the most important obstacles to an understanding of Weber's central thesis" (p. 62, emphasis added). But why is this clarification necessary? By demonstrating that Weber's distinction between facts and values is based not on a logical or methodological thesis but on an axiological one, Strauss shows that Weber's methodology is not as divorced from political and moral considerations as is usually

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assumed by social scientists. Strauss's discussion of the theoretical and practical consequences of Weber's thesis was necessary because, he thought, contemporary social science accepted Weber's thesis about the impossibility of objective norms partly because it believed this thesis necessarily leads to toleration or democracy and genuine scientific knowledge (pp. 5-6, 49). By showing the problematic consequences of Weber's thesis, Strauss dispels some of its charms and opens the way for an adequate understanding of it.

The Basis of Weber's Position

The "precise meaning" of Weber's axiological thesis becomes visible, if we examine the limitations of Strauss's criticism of Weber's thesis about the origins of capitalism (p. 62). Strauss had argued earlier that Weber's thesis on the origin of the spirit of capitalism should have been that it was not so much Calvinism as "the corruption or degeneration of Calvin's theology [that] led to the emergence of the capitalist spirit," and that Weber failed to make this qualification on account of his prohibition of value judgments (p. 59-60). Strauss now redeems Weber by affirming that in fact it is not so easy to judge between Calvin and his followers. The followers were corrupt, or inferior, by the lights of Calvinism, but not by the lights of certain secular thinkers: "assuming that Calvinist theology were a bad thing, its corruption was a good thing" (p. 62). In other words, the resolution of this issue depends on the resolution of the conflict between religion and irreligion. The alleged irreconcilability of this conflict renders questionable many other apparently objective value judgments. Accordingly, Strauss now shows that the value judgments implied in the preceding section's distinctions between Gretchen and a prostitute (pp. 52-53), a blundering general and an unusually resourceful one (pp. 54-55), and virtues and vices (p. 51), lose their objective certainty or their significance once they are confronted with a position that condemns all sexuality, views war as absolutely evil, and considers all human virtues to be ultimately only splendid vices (p. 63).37

37. But compare Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy?, p. 22.

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Thus, in restating Weber's thesis, Strauss now for the first time puts the emphasis on the conflict between ultimate values. Human action cannot be understood without evaluation. Although Strauss does not explicitly state this here, this is because human activity is purposive.38 A chair, for example, is made for sitting. A chair on which one cannot sit is a bad chair, and a carpenter who unintentionally makes such a chair is a bad carpenter. What is true about the productions of carpenters is true also about the productions, actions, and reflections of artists, generals, statesmen, philosophers, etc. Immediate ends, however, presuppose or point to further ends. We value a chair because it gives us rest and comfort, but with a view to what work do we want rest and comfort? The central difficulty, both theoretical and practical, that occupies Weber's thought stems from his conclusion that all human actions presuppose ultimate ends that cannot be chosen rationally. The irrationality of these ends ultimately colors every human action and, given the dependence of observation on evaluation, every attempt to understand. "Weber's whole notion of the scope and function of the social sciences rests on the allegedly demonstrable premise that the conflict between ultimate values cannot be resolved by human reason" (p. 64). Strauss compels us to consider whether this premise "has really been demonstrated or whether it has merely been postulated under the impulse of a specific moral preference" (p. 64).

Strauss first suggests that Weber postulated his premise for moral reasons. He suspects a moral motive behind Weber's position, for although the proof of Weber's premise would require "an effort of the magnitude of that which went into the conception and elaboration of the Critique of Pure Reason,"39 Weber, "who wrote thousands of pages, devoted hardly more than thirty of them to a thematic discussion of the basis of his whole position" (p. 64). Why was this premise, which had been rejected by "the whole galaxy of political philosophers from Plato to Hegel" (p. 35), so self-evident to Weber? A "provisional" answer to this question is supplied by Weber's suggestion that his thesis is a generalized version of an older and more common view that the

38. Ibid., p. 22. 39. Ibid.

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conflict between ethics and politics is insoluble. "It seems, then, that it was the spirit of power politics that begot Weber's position" (p. 64). More adequately, Strauss argues that Weber's thesis was the consequence of his view that human life is "essentially an inescapable conflict."40 Weber believed in the supremacy of conflict not only because he maintained that "peace" is merely a transformation of conflict and hence an illusion but also because he maintained, following Nietzsche, that the attainment of "peace and universal happiness" leads to the degradation of man. Weber's view of the primacy of conflict did not lead him to "a warrior ethics as a basis of a 'power politics' that is guided exclusively by the consideration of national interest," for this would lead to a situation in which "the individual is at peace with himself while the world is ruled by war." A warrior ethics is too peaceful and harmonious for Weber. Conflict must go to "the root of the individual." The warrior's struggle for elbow room for his nation must be accompanied by a sense of guilt stemming from an absolute duty directing him "toward universal peace or universal brotherhood" (p. 65).41 Since Weber recognized the duty to strive for peace and universal brotherhood because he wanted to avoid the possibility of inner peace, one may conclude that Weber's preference for the tragic was responsible for his thesis that there is no solution to the conflict between ultimate values. As Strauss says elsewhere, Weber "has postulated the insolubility of all value conflicts because his soul craved a universe in which failure, that bastard of forceful sinning accompanied by still more forceful faith, instead of felicity and serenity, was to be the mark of human nobility."42

40. Consider Weber's criticism of the attitude of "the mere 'power politician"' for having no relation to the knowledge of tragedy with which all action is truly interwoven (MWES, pp. 116-17). Weber's belief in the supremacy of conflict is the common link that explains the otherwise mysterious connection between Weber's inaugural lecture (Gesammelte Politische Schriften, ed. Johannes Winckelman [Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1958], pp. 1-25) and his later writings which are based on the notion of a value-free social science.

41. Compare this with Nietzsche's preference for tragedy (26n.) and his description of the future ruler as "the Roman Caesar with Christ's soul" (The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale [New York: Random House,1967], p. 513).

42. Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy?, p. 23.

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Strauss's tracing of Weber's position to a moral motive would be irresponsible if he did not show the untenability of Weber's arguments for his position. Although Weber did not write a comprehensive critique of evaluating reason, he did give three examples to prove his contention that the conflicts between ultimate values are irreconcilable. I shall not discuss the first two cases, because I believe that Strauss successfully resolves them, indicates the way to such a resolution, or challenges the implications that Weber drew from them (pp. 67-69). What proves to be deeply problematic is the conflict between the ethics of intention and the ethics of responsibility, that is, the question whether the intention behind an action is in itself sufficient to justify it or whether one is responsible for the predictable consequences of an action (pp. 69-76). Strauss shows the absurdity of Weber's contention that the kingdom of the consistent syndicalist, whom Weber considered to be a representative of the ethics of intention, is not of this world, not in order to refute Weber but to show that what Weber called the ethics of intention is really "a certain interpretation" of Christian ethics: "The Christian acts rightly and leaves the consequences of his action to God."43 Weber's interpretation of Christian ethics is not merely an example of the ethics of intention, as Weber seems to suggest, because no this-worldly social movement can be indifferent to the consequences of its actions and because the ethics of intention is indefensible without divine support. Accordingly, Strauss argues that the real issue-"what Weber really meant" (p. 70)- underlying the conflict between the two ethics is the conflict between this-worldly and otherworldly ethics.

Strauss could have resolved this issue by claiming that Weber's interpretation of Christian ethics is erroneous. In fact, in the original lectures on which the published text of Natural Right and History is based, Strauss does suggest that Weber misinterprets Christian ethics, "for why did Jesus demand that one should combine the innocence of doves with the wisdom of serpents?"44 In other words, Weber exaggerates the conflict between Christian

43. MSS, p. 16. 44. Charles R. Walgreen lectures delivered at the University of Chicago,

1946, III, p. 4; see also 70n.

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ethics and political wisdom. But the suggestion of the published text is that even the correct interpretation of biblical morality is incompatible with this-worldly understanding: a life of obedient love is incompatible with a life of free insight (p. 74). Thus, Strauss does not let Weber's inadequate formulation blur the seriousness of the conflict to which Weber points. On this crucial point, Strauss's interpretation of Weber is almost the opposite of a polemic. It is a confrontation in the sense articulated by Heidegger.

But what is the relevance for social science of arguments based on divine revelation? Social science cannot take notice of objections made against it by divine revelation, "because they are based on presuppositions which can never be evident to unassisted human reason," and by heeding these objections social science would become untrue to its own principle. Moreover, the incompatibility of a certain otherworldly ethics with this-worldly ethics does not prove that social science is incapable of arriving at objective norms; "if genuine insights of social science can be questioned on the basis of revelation, revelation is not merely above reason but against reason" (p. 71). In this case, one may conclude that the revelation in question, and not social science, should be rejected. Strauss, however, argues that social science can dismiss objections made on the basis of divine revelation only if social science can convince itself that the social scientific understanding of the world is legitimate, that is, if it can give a clear and certain account of its own basis. But this is precisely what Weber claims social science cannot do.

Weber believed, Strauss argues, that philosophy or science "is unable to give a clear or certain account of its basis," because it rests not on evident principles but on faith (p. 72). However metaphysically neutral science may claim to be, every scientific activity has a super-empirical basis, namely, the conviction that scientific truth is valuable: "all our problems are contained in the presupposition that what is yielded by scientific work is important in the sense that it is 'worth being known,'" a presupposition which "cannot be proved by scientific means."45 The value of science became questionable on account of the transformation of science in modern times: "The goodness of science or philosophy

45. MWES, p. 143; MSS, p. 110; Strauss, Roscher and Knies, p. 116.

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was no problem as long as one could think that it is 'the way to true being' or to 'true nature' or to 'true happiness"' (p. 72).46 Weber still believed that science could provide clarity about the situation of man as man, but he vacillated about the status of scientific knowledge. On the one hand, he argued that scientific knowledge is not subjective in the sense of being valid for one person and not for others, and on the other hand, under the influence of historicism, he maintained that scientific truth is valid only for all those who seek the truth (pp. 72-73).47 What he seems to have meant by the latter contention is that one can reject scientific truths and the norms of scientific thinking because they presuppose the value of scientific truth and "the faith in the value of scientific truth is the product of certain cultures and is not a product of man's original nature."48 Weber's questioning of the value of scientific truth, however, was based not on his awareness of diverse cultures or a conviction of equality of all cultures, but on his awareness that belief in divine revelation is a serious possibility and thus on a rejection of the modern critique of religion.49 "What claims to be freedom from delusions is as much and as little delusion as the faiths which prevailed in the past and which may prevail in the future. We are irreligious because fate forces us to be irreligious and for no other reason" (p. 73).50 Although Weber remained attached to science and did not await

46. MWES, pp. 140-43. 47. MSS, p. 84. 48. Ibid., p. 110. 49. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York:

Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958), p. 13; MWES, pp. 350-57. Strauss argues that Spinoza's ultimate critique of revelation was his argument that "the world and human life are perfectly intelligible without the assumption of a mysterious God," but that Spinoza's system, and every other system, failed to give such an account. Spinoza's Critique of Religion, trans. E. M. Sinclair (New York: Schocken Books, 1965), pp. 28-29. Science, therefore, came to understand itself as infinitely progressive. Weber realized that this really is an unacknowledged admission by science of its defeat: an infinitely progressive science is meaningless and leads to weariness instead of satiety (MWES, pp. 137-40, 356). Whereas science presupposes that its object is accessible to reason, the infinitely progressive character of science suggests that "one can say with at least equal right that it [the object of science] is radically mysterious" (Strauss, "Relativism," in Relativism and the Study of Man, ed. Helmut Schoeck and J. W. Wiggens [Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1961], p. 154).

50. MWES, pp. 152-53.

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a religious revival, he was deeply moved by a powerful reason for welcoming one; he believed that "all devotion to causes or ideals has its roots in religious faith and, therefore, that the decline of religious faith will ultimately lead to the extinction of all causes or ideals" (pp. 73-74).51 According to Strauss, Weber's failure to resolve the conflict between his attachment to science and his despair at the consequences of "the modem this-worldly experiment" led him to postulate the irreconcilability of the conflicts between ultimate values.

This account of Weber's doubts about the idea of science is followed by an attempt "to state in more precise terms what Weber had in mind when he said that science seemed to be unable to give a clear or certain account of itself" (p. 74). "To state more precisely what was in Weber's mind" is a strange expression, and some commentators have argued that the section that follows these suggestions (pp. 74-76) has little or nothing to do with Weber.52 While this judgment is incorrect inasmuch as the conflict between religion and this-worldly understanding was clearly "in Weber's mind,"53 there is something to the observation: Strauss's language in this section is very different from Weber's and there are no references to Weber's writings. Strauss actually recasts Weber's problem. This recasting is necessary, because if modem science is not the perfection of science, "the crisis of modem life and of modern science does not necessarily make doubtful the idea of science" (p. 74). Accordingly, Strauss states Weber's problem in a language and categories that are not specifically modem. Whereas Weber describes the presupposition of all religions as the view that the world is meaningful, Strauss avoids the expression "meaning," because it seems to be derivative from the modern scientific postulate of a cosmos of natural

51. Ibid.; Weber, Protestant Ethic, p. 182. 52. Eden, "Why Weber Wasn't a Nihilist?," p. 225; Shadia Drury, The

Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988), pp. 38-39. 53. Compare Strauss's account with Weber's argument about the conflict

between science and religion: being unable to answer with cettainty the question of its own ,ltimate presupposition and being compelled in the name of intellectual integtity to regard the possession of rational culture as the highest good, the intellect not only shoulders the burden of ethical guilt, but also, and more decisively, is marked with "senselessness-if this cultural value is to be judged in terms of its own standard" (MWES, p. 355).

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causality that has no meaning. Prior to the nineteenth century people did not speak of the meaning of the world. They spoke about what is good. This is true of the Bible as well as the ancient philosophers. Similarly, Strauss replaces "religion" with "divine revelation," a conception which is both more precise and universal. Finally, because philosophy or science in the original sense of the term is the perfection of man's natural understanding, the conflict between revelation and science is no longer viewed as a conflict between revelation and one sphere of this-worldly life, but as the conflict between revelation and this-worldly understanding as such.5

Since man, unlike animals governed by instinct, needs guidance to attain what is good for him, and since this guidance can only be provided either by his unaided natural powers or by a being above him, Strauss argues that the most fundamental of all choices is the choice between human guidance and divine guidance. Historically, these alternatives have been represented in the conflict between philosophy or science in the original sense of the term55 and the Bible. There is a conflict between these two alternatives, because they proclaim the primacy of opposing ways of living: "a life of obedient love versus a life of free insight" (p. 74). Strauss thus suggests that the conflict between philosophy and the Bible is based primarily on their different orientations to the world and not on their disagreements about theoretical propositions, which may well be implied by these

54. MWES, pp. 323-59. Moreover, since Strauss does not share Weber's preference for tragedy, Strauss takes more seriously both revelation's claim and philosophy's claim to be the one thing needful (compare pp. 74-75 with Weber, MWES, pp. 148-49). Whereas Weber suggests that we should combine the ethics of intention and the ethics of responsibility (MWES, p. 127), Strauss argues that we can be either philosophers or theologians but not both.

55. Perhaps, a metaphysically neutral science would not be at odds with the Bible. But Strauss suggests that the non-neutrality of social science becomes visible in its analysis of religion: "The new science uses sociological or psychological theories regarding religion which exclude, without considering it, the possibility that religion rests ultimately on God's revealing Himself to man" (Liberalism: Ancient and Modern [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968], p. 218). The question is whether this apparent agnosticism is compatible with reverence for revelation or whether it "is actually doubt or distrust" of revelation. It should go without saying that the existence of pious social scientists does not affect the answer to this question.

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orientations. Since these orientations are contradictory, every attempt to harmonize philosophy and the Bible merely blurs the necessity of a choice, for "in every synthesis however impressive, one of the two opposed elements is sacrificed ...: philosophy, which means to be the queen, must be made the handmaid of revelation or vice versa" (p. 74).56 Now, "a bird's-eye view of the secular struggle between philosophy and theology" indicates that neither side has succeeded in really refuting the other: "All arguments in favor of revelation seem to be valid only if belief in revelation is presupposed; and all arguments against revelation seem to be valid only if unbelief is presupposed" (p. 75). But this state of affairs "seems" to decide in favor of revelation. The inability of revelation to refute philosophy does not put into question the consistency of revelation insofar as revelation's claim on human beings rests on faith. On the other hand, a defensive posture toward revelation is not possible for philosophy. If philosophy cannot refute revelation's contention that the life of obedient love is the best life, then the choice to engage in philosophy, "the life devoted to the quest for evident knowledge available to man as man," rests on an unevident decision. Philosophy or science appears to be self-contradictory. Strauss concludes that it was the conflict between divine revelation and philosophy or science that led Weber to realize with despair that "the sacrifice of intellect, which is abhorred by science or philosophy, is at the bottom of science or philosophy" and therefore to conclude "that the idea of science or philosophy suffers from a fatal weakness" (pp. 75-76).

Strauss seems to give two explanations of the basis of Weber's thesis. First, he argues that this thesis is the result of Weber's preference for the tragic and then he argues it is the result of the conflict between religion and science. What is the connection between these two explanations? I suggest that Weber's understanding of the conflict between science and religion was

56. Strauss, therefore, suggests that the Scholastic synthesis of philosophy and Christian revelation was really an attempt to resolve the conflict in favor of revelation. It was on account of this attempted resolution that philosophy first lost its character as a way of life and became an instrument or a department, a view which has survived Scholasticism and continues to obscure the conflict between philosophy and revelation.

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the serious basis of his view of the primacy of conflict and therefore of his preference for the tragic. Weber could not embrace religion, because he believed that such an embrace required "the sacrifice of the intellect." Nor could he embrace science without ambivalence, because he believed that science was destructive of religion and in destroying religion paved the way for Nietzsche's "last man," and because he feared that it too required "the sacrifice of the intellect." Only when these forces struggle against each other unsuccessfully can one avoid intellectual servitude and spiritual degradation. Weber's preference for the tragic, however, took on a life of its own, and this preference may explain why he extended the conflict between science and revelation to include completely this-worldly conflicts, such as that between syndicalism and Realpolitik.57 Perhaps it was also this preference that led him to postulate a dubious interpretation of Christian ethics as an ultimate value, for he wanted "to combine the anguish bred by atheism (the absence of any redemption, of any solace) with the anguish bred by revealed religion (the oppressive sense of guilt)" (p. 66). Thus, Weber's preference for the tragic obscures the character of the conflict between science and divine revelation. Accordingly, a more adequate treatment of this conflict is necessary in order to test Weber's thesis that this conflict cannot be resolved.

To summarize: social science cannot produce valid descriptive or prescriptive results if it does not take its bearing from valid values. The validity of everyday values is questionable if they rest on irreconcilable ultimate values. Weber maintained and Strauss seems to accept that the conflict between science or philosophy and religion is irreconcilable. Now, this conflict is relevant to social science only if social science cannot give an adequate account of itself, that is, only if this conflict not only shows that divine revelation and social science disagree with each other but also that the idea of science is rationally indefensible. As the search for wisdom, philosophy is based on the conviction that we do not possess wisdom. To justify itself philosophy must prove that those who have a reputation for wisdom are not wise.58 This means that political philosophy,

57. MSS, p. 16. 58. Plato The Apology 20d-22e.

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which is "the quest for knowledge of the good," must show that God has not revealed to man what is good.59 Without this justification of theoretical life, a justification that requires a tremendous intellectual effort, philosophy or science is merely a prejudice that hates all prejudices.

The Problem of Political Science

According to Strauss, the ultimate issue that shaped Weber's moral horizon and ultimately his theoretical position is the conflict between science or philosophy and religion. But what is the relevance of the conflict between revelation and science to contemporary social science, which, on the whole, seems to be dismissive of religion? Strauss sometimes suggests that there is a kinship between the contemporary politicization of science and revelation (pp. 6, 22).60 Indeed, they may be attractive for the same reason:

Revelation is always so uncertain to unassisted reason that it can never compel the assent of unassisted reason, and man is so built that he can find his satisfaction, his bliss, in free investigation, in articulating the riddle of being. But, on the other hand, he yearns so much for a solution of that riddle and human knowledge is always so limited that the need for divine illumination cannot be denied and the possibility of revelation cannot be refuted. (p. 75)

Revelation finds its psychological support in our yearning for the solution of the fundamental problems that face us. A similar yearning for a solution seems to have led a leading behavioralist, David Easton, in his 1969 presidential address to the American Political Science Association, to welcome post-behavioralism.61

59. Leo Strauss, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 172; Micah 6:8. This philosophic enterprise should not be confused with a polemic against religion, which seeks to discredit or weaken religion by hook or by crook.

60. Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy?, p. 104. Consider also Weber's contention that those who wanted to politicize the German university were turning it "into a theological seminary-except that it does not have the latter's religious dignity" (MSS, p. 7).

61. It may be objected that Easton was not concerned with fundamental riddles, but with important political issues such as urban riots and Vietnam. Yet there is a kinship between resoluteness in following moral and political agendas

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Although he did not argue that political scientists need to abandon science's objective of pursuing the truth, what he considered to be a "social crisis of unforeseen proportions" compelled him to consider whether political scientists should not subordinate this objective "to the undeniably urgent problems of the day."62 Paradoxically, many contemporary politicized disciplines are relativistic. The appeal of relativism is ambiguous. On the one hand, it may be attractive to some because they believe it truthfully portrays the ambiguity of all moral judgments. On the other hand, it fulfills the yearning for the solution of the fundamental riddles, insofar as its denial of the possibility of a solution to these riddles is meant to secure "the possibility of practice" (pp. 22, 48-49, 320-21). By denying the possibility of objective norms, popular forms of relativism undermine in advance criticisms of one's convictions and thus further one's freedom of action.

For Strauss the conflict between philosophy or science and revelation reflects human inclinations toward skepticism (satisfaction in articulating the riddle of being) and dogmatism (yearning for the solution of that riddle). Dogmatism can wear many guises but the need for it is most manifest in political and social life, for collective action presupposes an agreement about fundamental principles.63 The dissolution of such agreements leads to the breakdown of political societies. This consequence can most consistently be avoided if the fundamental principles are beyond doubt, and this certainty can be maintained if they were revealed by a god. It appears then that the conflict between revelation and philosophy is another and perhaps the deepest

and the disregard of precision, a disregard nourished by a hope based on either secular or religious faith that one's actions will prove to be correct. Consider Weber's argument that "some kind of faith must always exist" for a politician, because "the final result of political action often, no, even regularly, stands in completely inadequate and often even paradoxical relation to its original meaning" (MWES, p. 117).

62. Easton, "The New Revolution in Social Science," pp. 1053-55. 63. But must the agreement be an agreement about "ultimate values"? Has

not liberalism shown that this is not necessarily the case? To respond adequately to these serious objections, one must investigate the importance of the critique of religion for liberalism. One must also consider Strauss's contention that"a society that tolerates indefinitely many Weltanschauungen does this by virtue of one particular Weltanschauung"(Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, p. 37).

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stratum of the conflict between the requirements of political life and those of the philosophic life: "political life, if taken seriously, meant belief in the gods of the city, and philosophy is the denial of the gods of the city."4 Modern philosophy hoped to overcome this conflict and forge an alliance between philosophers and princes and the people against religious orthodoxy, by discovering the demonstrable truth about god, the soul, and the ends of government on the basis of the most thoroughgoing skepticism (p. 171). The modern philosophic and scientific accounts of the world, however, proved to be fundamentally hypothetical (p. 174). Orthodoxy, according to Strauss, was not refuted by modern philosophy or science but was merely laughed out of "its position from which it could not be dislodged by any proofs supplied by scripture or by reason."65 Modern philosophy or science is a building without a foundation if, as Strauss and Weber suggest, its rejection of faith, which is the presupposition of scientific activity, was itself an act of faith in the sense of an unevident conviction or belief. Humanistic relativism or "postmodernism" in general seems to recognize the problematic character of modern science, but insofar as it implicitly and therefore inadequately rejects revelation it also is based on an act of will or a moral attitude borrowed from moder thought. But does Strauss's own thought avoid this consequence, which, according to him, is fatal to philosophy?

In the final paragraphs of his essay, which at first glance seem uneventful and even disappointing, Strauss points to a path to a possible resolution to our difficulties, a path which perhaps would not have been possible without the work of Husserl and Heidegger.66 Strauss's victory over Weberian science seems to be a pyrrhic one, for he defeats that science only by giving an

64. Strauss, "The Spirit of Sparta or the Taste of Xenophon," p. 532. Weber suggests that the harmony between religion and politics was shattered by the emergence of universalistic religions of salvation, or more precisely, by the emergence of Christianity. Christianity, however, is still a social phenomenon. Although it came into conflict with the natural sib and the political orders of the world, it did not undermine the authority of the community but sought to reformulate and strengthen its basis. Accordingly, "prophecy has created a new social community" (MWES, pp. 333, 328-29).

65. Strauss, Spinoza's Critique of Religion, pp. 29-30. 66. Leo Strauss, "An Unspoken Prologue to a Public Lecture at St. John's,"

Interpretation 7:3 (1978): 2.

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argument that puts into question the possibility of philosophy or science as such.67 One would have expected a rebuttal from Strauss, but instead he "leaves the scene of the battle with a jest"68: "Let us hasten back from these awful depths to a superficiality [Weber's writings on the methodology of social sciences] which, while not exactly gay, promises at least a quiet sleep" (p. 76). This impression is not altogether correct, for by returning to Weber's methodological writings "we have not escaped trouble." Strauss argues that Weber's methodology depends on a neo-Kantian view of reality ("reality is an infinite and meaningless sequence"), which has become incredible today, apparently because of the emergence of phenomenology.69 Moreover, Weber himself could not adhere to this view consistently. Although Weber "could not deny that there is an articulation of reality that precedes all scientific articulation," he did not even attempt a coherent analysis of this articulation and occupied himself with definitions of ideal types. Yet this attempt is absolutely necessary for understanding the meaning of modern science, for the modern scientific understanding is a peculiar transformation of reality and the character of this transformation cannot be grasped without an examination of reality prior to this transformation. Accordingly, Strauss argues that in order to understand the character of the conflict between fundamental alternatives and to determine whether the conflict is soluble, one must develop a comprehensive analysis of social reality as "it is known to 'common sense,"' that is, as we know it in actual life (pp. 77-78). But what seems to be commonsensical is already affected by science: "To say nothing of technology, the world in which we live is free from ghosts, witches, and so on, with which, but for the existence of science, it would abound" (p. 79). In order to discover the radically prescientific world, one must "go back behind the first emergence of science or philosophy" (p. 79). Only the recovery and comprehensive analysis of the prescientific world would allow us to see the choice between human guidance and divine guidance in its original form and thereby provide us with a basis for responsible judgment on whether it is susceptible

67. Kennington, "Strauss's Natural Right and History," p. 69. 68. Ibid. 69. Turner and Factor, Max Weber, p. 119.

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of a solution. It seems that only on the basis of an adequate analysis of this world, which seems to be the common ground between the Bible and the Greek piety from which philosophy emerged, can we resolve the conflict between philosophy and revelation.

In the third chapter of Natural Right and History, "On the Origin of the Idea of Natural Right," Strauss reconstructs the prescientific world with the help of "the information that classical philosophy supplies about its origins" and "the most elementary premises of the Bible" (p. 80).70 The bulk of Natural Right and History, which is historical in character, is a response to the first two chapters,7 which deal with contemporary problems: "Far from being merely one of the innumerable themes of social science, history of political philosophy, and not logic, proves to be the pursuit concerned with the presuppositions of social science."72

Strauss emphasizes the conflict between philosophy and revelation more than his solution of that conflict. Accordingly, he invites us to counteract contemporary relativism with the view that we must choose between two irreconcilable antagonists. This invitation is understandable, for belief in the irresolvability of this conflict is not simply an evil. As Weber argued, "the shallowness of our routinized daily existence ... consists indeed in the fact that the persons who are caught up in it do not become aware, and above all do not wish to become aware," that the life they lead is a "motley of irreconcilably antagonistic values."73 We

70. Strauss argues that divine guidance originally took the form of divine laws, which informed man not only about his obligations to gods but also to other men. Concern for justice seems to be the common ground between classical philosophers and believers. If it is true "that the moral principles have a greater evidence than the teachings even of natural theology" (p. 164), one might hope that the quarrel between philosophy and revelation could be settled by an examination of the nature of justice.

71. In chapter 1 Strauss argues that in order to understand the issue between historicism and nonhistoricist philosophy we must have a nonhistoricist understanding of classical philosophy (the subject of chapter 4) and "an understanding of the genesis of historicism that does not take for granted the soundness of historicism" (the subjects of chapters 5 and 6). Political life seems to have been the original matrix of both history.and divine revelation.

72. Strauss, The City and Man, p. 10. 73. MSS, p. 18.

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can overcome this shallowness by choosing between the antagonistic values, or to use Weber's expression, between God and the devil. As for Strauss, by showing that modern philosophy or science has not refuted the possibility of revelation, he shows that Nietzsche's "last man" or the decline of the West is not the true consequence of Western thought. The continued existence of this conflict "is the secret of the vitality of Western civilization" for "man's highest possibilities cannot be exhausted as long as there are still high human tasks-as long as the fundamental riddles which confront man, have not been solved."74 But whatever advantages the thesis of the ultimate irreconcilability of the conflict between philosophy and revelation may have for civilization and for preserving the depth of the modern soul, it leads, as I have tried to show, to the destruction of philosophy or science and therefore could not have been Strauss's last word.75 Indeed, he occasionally suggests that Socratic philosophy possessed an adequate response to this difficulty.76 But his refusal to state this response explicitly and clearly prevents his better readers from assuming the necessity of philosophy understood as a way of life. Paradoxically, by proceeding thus he protects philosophy, for the self-destruction of modem political philosophy or science is partly the result of its original acceptance "on trust [of] the view that political philosophy or political science is possible or necessary" (p. 167).

74. Strauss, Introduction to Political Philosophy, p. 289; The City and Man, p. 2. 75. Compare Strauss, An Introduction to Political Philosophy, pp. 289-90

with 309-310. 76. "As far as I know, the present-day arguments in favor of revelation

against philosophy are based on an inadequate understanding of classical philosophy" (ibid., p. 300, emphasis added). The classical response to revelation would not lead to the spiritual exhaustion of the individual, if it does not presuppose the solution to the riddle of being. In fact, one may argue that response is necessary so that we may become free to articulate that riddle.

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Documents

Behnegar. Leo Strauss's Confrontation With Weber