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July 26, 2005
Leo Strauss's response to the crisis of modernity, the view that 20th century relativism, scientism, historicism, and nihilism have been responsible for the deterioration of modern liberal society, and philosophy, is natural right. Natural right blocks the historicist move that leads to relativism and nihilism as it provides a firm foundation in reality for the distinction between right and wrong.
Strauss's project was to recover nature as the foundation for all our morality and so block postmodern nihilism and the historicism of the post-Hegelians historicists, who deny that reason can discover unchanging principles of right and wrong. The big struggle between natural right and historicism is at the core of modernity, and you can interpret Strauss's texts to argue that this conflict lay at the heart of the founding of the American republic. That event was founded on natural rights, and the Founders believed in their revealed religion as grounding natural law.
Natural Right and History explores this terrain by re-reading the classic texts in political philosophy to show that the reasons which have led to a rejection of natural right are not good ones. Strauss is engaged in revitalizing the potential of political philosophy, which had been buried by positivism in the social sciences and historicism in philosophy.
In this text Leo Strauss deploys his ancient-verses-modern dichotomy to highlight the distinction between classical and modern natural right. We usually understand the ancient modern difference in terms of the classical view that "human beings are by nature a social being" or political animal, and the moderns who held that the individual is prior to society. Strauss maintains that the classical understanding of political things is decisively superior to the modern one.
Classical natural right claims the good life for man to be "the life that is in accordance with the natural order of man's being, the life that flows from a well-ordered or healthy soul . . . The perfection of man's nature." However, beginning with Hobbes, modern natural right finds the possibility of man's perfection wholly impractical, instead championing the instinct of self-preservation and the rights of the individual.
Instead of reading Strauss's duality as ancients good, moderns bad,we can explore their presupposition to gain an understanding of modernity. The ancients in one way or another conceived of nature as a restraining order within which human beings lived out lives of lesser or greater virtue; the moderns saw nature as an alien other to be overcome through human activity. The distinction between the ancients and the moderns lies in determining which is the central grounding principle for moral and political life--nature's order, or humanity's will.
What Strauss makes apparent is the necessity of the opposition between the ancients and the moderns, between natural law and natural right, between natural order and human freedom. So at the root of modernity is the view that there is nothing independent of humanity which is superior in dignity to human artifice; the design of politics is rooted in human freedom and not divine or natural necessity.
Locke, for instance, was interpreted by Strauss as rejection of virtue as a concern of government. Locke, according to Strauss, turned to acquisitiveness as a substitute for virtue. Does that mean that constitutionalism needs a stronger foundation than the Lockean doctrine of natural rights based on self-interest?
Hence the importance of Strauss's interpretation of the American constitution. On this interpretation, The Declaration of Indepedence marked an understanding, on the part of the American Founders, that connected them to the classics, to the classical understanding of natural right and to the biblical tradition. That means a doctrine of natural rights under natural law.
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