So Strauss was turning the critique of metaphysical subjectivism onto political thought? The "natural right" to freely pursue one's "happiness", interpreted as individual natural interests in security and enjoyment, is deployed to derive the polity in terms of the securement of "natural right" to the freedom to pursue one's interest. But this renders "freedom" the measure of "right", to which no "natural" limit can be set, leading to the disintegration of the polity as the boundless pursuit of individual freedom, from which ultimately no binding norms can be derived.

However, the reactionary appeal to the "authority" of "natural law", as the source of limiting norms, suffers even more greviously from the defect upon which Enlightenment conceptions of "natural right" founder: the attempt to "ground" a normative politico-ethical order on a conception of "nature" as a harmoniously given order, which the rise and development of natural science have long since exploded, even as they have given rise to new human powers, freedoms, and enjoyments.

The problem with the attempt to "found" the state upon the securement pre-given "natural rights" to the pursuit of individual interests and "happiness",- (which is actually historically the attempt to transform the state from the conditions and claims on which it had priorly arisen),- is that the state gives rise to the public, which is not reducible to the additive pursuit of individual interests and their securement. The state, (which terms devolved from "lo stato" since Machiavelli, as the Prince's estate), and the public which come to mutually constrain and constitute each other, give rise to the political, not as an "artificial man", as Hobbes characterized the state, but as an artificial status of "man", one in which the collective conditions for the pursuit of individual "freedom" mean that the pursuit of "freedom" is always shadowed and constrained by the conditions of power, into which individual interests are abstracted, alienated, and constituted as "rights".

The individual exists politically only as invested by power with "rights", in conflictual tension with the conflictual pursuit of "legitimate" consensus, by which the collective realities of power are to be regulated. (The value of rights is not that they are "natural", nor "inalienable", since they are in a sense constituted by alienation, but rather that they allow for the more productive pursuit and resolution of conflict, that is, that they raise the collective constitution of power to a "higher" political level). The political condition of modernity cannot be grounded in the "authority" of "natural law" any more than through the "freedom" of "natural right", but rather is a condition of ethico-political groundlessness, in which norms can be generated and negotiated only in and through the ever-shifting course of individual and collective fates. It's only "ground" is the collective "will" to sustain the human artifice of a common world.

John
re your opening paragraph:

So Strauss was turning the critique of metaphysical subjectivism onto political thought? The "natural right" to freely pursue one's "happiness", interpreted as individual natural interests in security and enjoyment, is deployed to derive the polity in terms of the securement of "natural right" to the freedom to pursue one's interest. But this renders "freedom" the measure of "right", to which no "natural" limit can be set, leading to the disintegration of the polity as the boundless pursuit of individual freedom, from which ultimately no binding norms can be derived.

That is how I understand Strauss's argument against the value-relativism of liberal modernity.This was the 1930s and he was arguing against a positivistic social science that had embraced instrumental reason as the only form of reason. He says that according to the:

positivistic interpretation of relativism which prevails in present-day social science … reason can tell us which means are conducive to which ends; it cannot tell us which attainable ends are to be preferred to other attainable ends. Reason cannot tell us that we ought to choose attainable ends..

It is an accurate description of utilitarian economics, which holds that reason is and can only be a instrument of our passionate desires or preferences.

So Strauss turns back to classical natural law as the ground upon which to build the objective ethics that underpins the polity. Strauss contrasted natural and medieval natural law with "modern" natural law, culminating in the thought of John Locke. As Strauss saw matters, Machiavelli and Hobbes abandoned the classical pursuit of virtue. Instead, they founded political philosophy on passion and self-interest.

I guess the scholarly question is whether there is as great an antithesis between an ancient Aristotelian doctrine of natural law and a modern theory of subjective natural rights as Strauss holds. One could argue that Locke's rationalist theory was that reason can discover the natural law of man, and from this can discover the natural rights of liberty.

John,
re your second paragraph re Strauss's turn back to classical natural law to counter positivism and historicism in political science:

...the reactionary appeal to the "authority" of "natural law", as the source of limiting norms, suffers even more grieviously from the defect upon which Enlightenment conceptions of "natural right" founder: the attempt to "ground" a normative politico-ethical order on a conception of "nature" as a harmoniously given order, which the rise and development of natural science have long since exploded, even as they have given rise to new human powers, freedoms, and enjoyments.

I would applaud Strauss' desire to restore values and political ethics to the study of politics.

Strauss' return to a classical conception of classical natural law (he recognizes Socratic-Platonic and Aristotelian versions of natural law),to replace his rejection of individual natural right, means that all is left to the prudential judgment of the wise statesman. However, he does make the (historical) link of connecting "way of life of a society" and "form of government" . He says that:

the character, or tone of a society depends on what the society regards as most respectable or most worthy of admiration. But by regarding certain habits or attitudes as most respectable, a society admits the superiority, the superior dignity, of those human beings who most embody the habits or attitudes in question.
That can apply to the US as well as to Ancient Greece or Rome.

As I understand it classical natural law recognizes "rights" only as they were concomitants of one's position in society. Thus, one's "rights" and responsibilities the duties one owed to others through society and the rights of one's class. My reading of Cicero is that the freedoms, personal and private, which constituted Libertas, were conceived of as the rights not of the isolated individual but of the citizen within the organized community of the Roman state. The state, the laws, and the customs and traditions of the Roman People were central to the realization of liberty. So freedom is defined as those who live according to the "right" as it is defined by natural law.

If these these duties and responsibilities were dictated by natural law.I guess that one interpretation points out that the natural law is conceived as a natural moral order rather than a natural physical order. But I've never really understood what Cicero meant by the "natural order of reason and law".

I presume that it is a normative notion, the law of nature as a rule and standard to guide the behavior of moral beings, as in traditional law of nature doctrines.This rule or standard is then connected to kinds of beings, which have certain natures---a thing exists in such a way as to depend on no other thing for its existence. Laws are necessary relations deriving from the nature of things.

Linking to Christian Dominionists, now? Really, Gary, you're quite adventurous in the brave new world of the internets!

The trouble with metaphysical thinkings is that they inherently confuse natural and normative orders, whether through regarding normative order as pregiven by a natural order of "things", through an "economy" of transcendence, or by attempting to construe a given natural order in terms of normative ideals. ("Reason" is neither a mere subjective faculty, nor something inherently given in the order of the world, but rather, a structure of norms, embodied, if at all, in the conditions of human practices and relations comprising and sustaining a form of life. The "nature", connection, scope, differentiation and limits of such a structure of norms are what remain to be argued about, but not its unattainable transcendent "ground").

(That Cicero regards both gods and mortals as constrained by transcendent natural law, by the way, is precisely an expression of a pagan outlook. Under monotheism, with its founding critique of "idolatry", God is "omnipotent" precisely because, as the unity of the world, he is transcedent to it, that is, not subject to the human contestation with or manipulation of natural forces).

Not to try and go toe-to-toe with Strauss, but I don't think "natural law" is much of a big deal with Aristotle, (as opposed to his medieval interpreters), though the "externalism" of Greek thinking is to be noted. It boils down to how one construes the interrelation between theoretical and practical reason, which itself boils down mostly to the interpretation of the 10th book of NE, as to whether the practical life is subordinate to the supreme goal of the theoretical life, or whether it has a separate and equal, i.e. unsubordinate and irreplaceable, significance and "dignity", (in which case the bliss of the theoretical life has an element of political amorality). If one, following Gadamer, allows for the separation of practical from theoretical reason, then the crucial distinction of praxis, as bound to order of human relations, inevitably marked by finitude and history, from techne, as concerned with the cultivation and control of nature, comes to the fore. (Strauss, in contrast to, say, Heidegger and Adorno, is scarcely unique in criticizing positivist, "value-free" social science or rampant economistic instrumentalism: what distinguishes Strauss is that he lays the blame solely on the historical condition of human existence, as if finitude and temporality could be abolished by fiat). Without that distinction, the difference of political and "natural" ends becomes obscured, and politics willy-nilly becomes reduced to a kind of techne, "statecraft". The deliberately archaic emphasis on the "virtue" of leaders in idealized "regimes" serves to deflect attention of elucidating the quality of judgment, whether on the part of leaders or citizens, and the appeal to "natural law" fails to provide any real standard or criterion for the delimitation of political orders and their limits, but rather serves to immunize the "authority" of political elites from the allegedly corrosive effects of skeptical questioning, which might lead to the ideological unmasking of the real interests by which their pretensions to "authority" actually operate. But then I don't think Strauss' "Platonism" should be taken at face value rather than as a mask for his inverted Nietzscheanism, (just as Nietzsche could be intepreted as an inverted Platonist). Emphasizing the unbounded "virtue" of privileged elites simply denies the conflictual human relations from which such "virtue" derives and the political manipulations by which it is maintained, though it does make for a nicely tidy worldview, to soothe the nerves of the unregenerate hoi polloi.

If virtue ethics is to be seriously considered within a post-metaphysical context, it is not because the summation and perfection of virtues represent the summum bonum mandated by natural order, but because, once separated from any metaphysical butressing, it can bring out the issue of conflicts rooted in incommensurable values, (whether within or between agents or collectivities), and identify "virtues" as those conditions of life and dispositions that can best sustain the more "productive" resolution of the conflicts that inherently bedevil human relations.