Skidelsky on Strauss 

Skidelsky on Strauss

Thanks to Alterman: On the whole there is a lot of good in this essay. Strauss never had visions of improving the whole world; his emphasis was on having a place to study; modern democracy supplied that, and perhaps most deserved praise for doing so. Strauss probably judged liberal democracy, as he would any regime, by its results as much as by its claims of justice; and it's even possible that other historically-known regimes, if not regimes of today, have actually had stronger claims of justice. The neo-cons have departed from Strauss.

Apart from benefitting the students themselves, Strauss obviously hoped that having schools of true liberal education would actually benefit democracy. But again, was this really a side benefit, from his point of view? Did he even hope modern democrats would exaggerate how much they benefitted from these schools, so that they would support them or at least leave them alone?

"Liberal democracies," as the Straussians Kenneth Deutsch and Walter Soffer put it, "need to learn standards of excellence that exert an 'upward pull' against the demands of physical gratification."

Strauss's own response to this predicament was, as we have seen, to cultivate pockets of wisdom in the interstices of mass society, hoping that they would, over time, impart their "tone" to the republic as a whole.

According to a view which today is rather common and which may be described as Marxist or crypto-Marxist, the classics preferred the rule of the urban patriciate because they themselves belonged to the urban patriciate or were hangers-on of the urban patriciate. We need not take issue with the contention that, in studying a political doctrine, we must consider the bias, and even the class bias, of its originator. It suffices to demand that the class to which the thinker in question belongs be correctly identified. In the common view the fact is overlooked that there is a class interest of the philosophers qua philosophers, and this oversight is ultimately due to the denial of the possibility of philosophy.... Now it is an experience of many centuries in greatly different natural and moral climates that there was one and only one class which was habitually sympathetic to philosophy, and not intermittently, like kings; and this was the urban patriciate. The common people had no sympathy for philosophy and philosophers.