Bénéton begins Les Régimes Politiques by emphasizing the importance of defining what constitutes a political regime. For him, a political regime is not merely a set of institutions or legal frameworks; it is a broader system encompassing the organization of power, the principles guiding governance, and the relationship between rulers and the ruled. Bénéton stresses that political regimes must be understood in their entirety, considering their formal structures and the underlying values and ideologies that shape their functioning. This holistic approach allows him to draw meaningful comparisons between different regimes and to assess their strengths and weaknesses more effectively.

Central to Bénéton’s analysis is his classification of political regimes, which he derives from classical political theory. He draws heavily on Aristotle’s typology, categorizing regimes based on who rules and for whose benefit. According to this classification, regimes can be broadly divided into three types: monarchy (rule by one), aristocracy (rule by the few), and polity or democracy (rule by the many). These can degenerate into a corrupt form: tyranny, oligarchy, and mob rule, respectively. Bénéton adopts this framework but adapts it to contemporary political realities, recognizing that modern states rarely fit neatly into these categories and that hybrid regimes are increasingly common.

Bénéton contrasts the political structures outlined by Machiavelli, Montesquieu, and Marx with Aristotle’s account of regimes, highlighting the shortcomings of modern approaches and demonstrating Aristotle’s enduring relevance. In seeking to redefine politics in purely pragmatic and amoral terms, Machiavelli dismisses the classical emphasis on the common good and virtue. For Machiavelli, the distinction between just and unjust regimes is irrelevant; the effectiveness of power, secured through force or deceit, is paramount. Bénéton critiques this approach for neglecting the stabilizing role of legitimacy and shared moral values, which Aristotle identified as essential to a well-ordered polis. Unlike Machiavelli’s focus on expediency, Aristotle’s framework insists on aligning political power with justice and the natural order, fostering stable governance through the active consent and virtue of the governed.

Montesquieu’s tripartite classification of regimes—republic, monarchy, and despotism—marks a departure from Aristotle’s nuanced typology that integrates the number of rulers and their orientation toward the common good. While Montesquieu emphasizes the importance of institutional structures and the spirit of laws, Bénéton argues that his analysis lacks the depth of Aristotle’s moral and teleological foundation. Montesquieu focuses on the mechanics of governance and the principles animating different systems, such as virtue in republics and honor in monarchies. Still, he does not address the intrinsic nature of justice and the cultivation of human flourishing as central to political life. By contrast, Aristotle provides a more holistic account, categorizing regimes not merely by their structure but by their alignment with the virtuous development of citizens, thereby situating political life within the broader context of human excellence.

In his critique of political regimes, Marx subordinates politics to economics, reducing regimes to mere instruments of class struggle and modes of production. Bénéton identifies this economic determinism as a fundamental flaw, as it dismisses the autonomy and moral dimensions of political life. Aristotle’s account, by contrast, maintains the primacy of politics as the architectonic science, shaping all other human activities. While Marx envisions the ultimate dissolution of political regimes in a classless society, Aristotle recognizes the perpetual necessity of political structures to mediate human relations and promote the common good. Bénéton concludes that Aristotle’s emphasis on justice, virtue, and the moral purpose of governance offers a superior framework, preserving the intrinsic dignity and complexity of political life in a way that modern theories fail to achieve.

Bénéton critiques the 20th-century behavioral political sciences, as represented by figures like David Easton, Robert Dahl, and Gabriel Almond, for their reductive approach to political regimes. These thinkers prioritize empirical methodologies and systemic generalizations, often modeled on the natural sciences, to analyze political life. Focusing on observable behaviors, patterns, and measurable dynamics reduces regimes to mechanistic frameworks devoid of moral or cultural depth. For example, Easton’s “systems theory” views politics as an input-output process, while Dahl’s pluralist model treats power as dispersed among competing groups, and Almond’s “structural-functionalism” emphasizes universal roles and functions. Bénéton argues that these approaches overlook the qualitative and normative distinctions between regimes, which Aristotle emphasizes as central. Aristotle’s account sees regimes not just as systems of governance but as expressions of ethical and communal life grounded in justice, legitimacy, and the common good—dimensions behavioral political science fails to address.

Moreover, Bénéton critiques the behavioral sciences’ claim to value-neutrality, which he sees as fundamentally flawed and inadequate for understanding political regimes. By striving for objectivity, thinkers like Dahl and Almond flatten the profound distinctions between democratic, oligarchic, and tyrannical regimes, reducing them to variations in institutional structures or distributions of power. This perspective erases the moral and teleological aspects of political life that Aristotle highlights, particularly the idea that regimes aim at specific ends—some noble, others corrupt. For Aristotle, the regime determines the ethical orientation of its citizens and the pursuit of the common good. In contrast, behavioral science, with its descriptive focus, neglects the question of how regimes cultivate or undermine virtue, leaving its analysis ethically impoverished and unable to evaluate the qualitative differences that make one regime superior to another.

Bénéton underscores how the behavioral sciences’ emphasis on systemic regularities and universal patterns fails to grapple with the historical and cultural particularities that shape regimes. Aristotle’s analysis, rooted in the diversity of political life, acknowledges the interplay of historical, ethical, and social factors in determining a regime’s character. For instance, Aristotle differentiates between regimes based on their alignment with justice and their capacity to promote human flourishing, recognizing the profound consequences of these distinctions for civic life, and in its quest for generality, behavioral political science disregards such nuances, treating regimes as interchangeable mechanisms for managing power. Bénéton concludes that while behavioral approaches offer valuable technical insights, they ultimately fall short of Aristotle’s richer and more holistic understanding of regimes as the foundation of communal and ethical life.

Bénéton’s discussion of democracy is remarkably nuanced and insightful. He recognizes democracy as the dominant political regime of the modern era but carefully distinguishes between different forms of democracy. He differentiates between “classical democracy,” which he associates with direct participation by the citizens in the governance process, and “representative democracy,” which is characterized by the election of representatives who make decisions on behalf of the people. Bénéton argues that while representative democracy is the most prevalent form today, it has its challenges and potential pitfalls.

One of the key themes in Bénéton’s analysis of democracy is the tension between “liberty and equality.” He observes that modern democracies are often torn between the desire to promote individual freedoms and the drive to achieve greater social and economic equality. Bénéton states this tension can lead to contradictions and conflicts within democratic societies. For example, policies promoting equality, such as wealth redistribution, may infringe on individual liberties. In contrast, policies prioritizing freedom, such as laissez-faire economic practices, may exacerbate social inequalities. He argues that managing this tension is one of the central challenges for modern democracies and requires carefully balancing competing values.

Bénéton is also critical of what he sees as the “excesses of democratic egalitarianism.” He warns that an overemphasis on equality can lead to a leveling of society that undermines excellence, merit, and the pursuit of the common good. In his view, democracy should not merely focus on ensuring equal outcomes but should also strive to cultivate virtues and promote the well-being of the community as a whole. Bénéton is concerned that contemporary democracies, in their pursuit of equality, may neglect these higher goals and reduce politics to a mere struggle for power and resources. This, he argues, can lead to the erosion of civic virtue and a decline in the quality of public life.

Another critical aspect of Bénéton’s analysis is his exploration of the “moral foundations of political regimes.” He argues that the legitimacy and stability of any political regime depend on its moral and ethical underpinnings. In this regard, Bénéton is mainly concerned with the role of “virtue” in governance. Drawing on classical political philosophy, he contends that a good regime is one that promotes virtue among its citizens and rulers. For Bénéton, virtue is not just a personal quality bujusticet ajustice public good that is essential for the proper functioning of society. He believes that without a commitment to virtue, political regimes will likely become corrupt and degenerate, leading to tyranny or chaos.

Bénéton’s emphasis on virtue leads him to critique modern liberal democracies, which he believes have largely abandoned the pursuit of virtue in favor of “procedural justice” and individual rights. While he acknowledges the importance of these principles, he argues that they are insufficient for sustaining a healthy political community. Bénéton worries that the focus on individual rights and freedoms can lead to a kind of moral relativism, where the pursuit of self-interest takes precedence over the common good. This, he suggests, can result in a fragmented and atomized society where civic engagement and social cohesion are weakened.

In addition to his critique of modern democracy, Bénéton also explores the dynamics of “authoritarian regimes.” He is particularly interested in how these regimes maintain control and legitimacy in the absence of democratic processes. Bénéton argues that authoritarian regimes often rely on a combination of coercion and consent, using propaganda, surveillance, and repression to suppress dissent while also seeking to cultivate a sense of legitimacy through appeals to tradition, nationalism, or ideology. He notes that while authoritarian regimes can achieve stability, they are often brittle and prone to collapse if their sources of legitimacy are undermined.

Bénéton’s analysis of totalitarianism, a particularly extreme form of authoritarianism, contributes significantly to his understanding of political regimes. He identifies totalitarianism as a regime that seeks total control over all aspects of life, including politics, the economy, culture, and even personal beliefs. Bénéton highlights the dangers of totalitarian regimes, particularly their tendency to dehumanize individuals and reduce them to mere instruments of the state. He argues that totalitarianism represents a profound threat to human dignity and freedom and that its emergence is often the result of profound social and political crises that disrupt the normal functioning of democratic institutions.

In Les Régimes Politiques, Bénéton also engages with the concept of “regime change” and the conditions under which political regimes transform. He argues that a combination of internal and external factors, including economic crises, social unrest, wars, and ideological shifts, often drive regime change. Bénéton is particularly interested in how regimes manage or fail to manage these pressures and what this reveals about their strengths and vulnerabilities. He suggests that successful regime change often requires not just the removal of the old regime but the establishment of a new political order that is both legitimate and capable of addressing the underlying causes of the crisis.

Finally, Bénéton concludes his analysis by reflecting on the future of political regimes in the modern world. He is cautiously optimistic about the prospects for democracy but warns that the challenges it faces, particularly the tension between liberty and equality, must be carefully managed. He also emphasizes the importance of cultivating civic virtue and a sense of common purpose in order to sustain democratic governance. Bénéton’s work is a call to political philosophers and practitioners alike to engage deeply with political regimes’ moral and ethical dimensions and seek ways to strengthen the foundations of democratic life.

In conclusion, Philippe Bénéton’s Les Régimes Politiques offers a rich and nuanced exploration of political regimes, drawing on classical political theory while addressing contemporary challenges. Bénéton’s analysis is characterized by its emphasis on the moral and ethical dimensions of governance, particularly the role of virtue in sustaining political order. His critique of modern democracy, focusing on the tension between liberty and equality, provides valuable insights into the challenges facing democratic regimes today. Through his examination of different types of regimes, including authoritarianism and totalitarianism, Bénéton delivers a comprehensive framework for understanding the complexities of political life and the conditions necessary for the success and stability of political regimes.

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Leo Strauss was one of the most insightful and consequential if not otherwise controversial, political philosophers and classicists of the last century. To his critics, Strauss is the bugaboo guy who is the dark mastermind of American imperialism and neoconservatism (notwithstanding, such conspiracies have been thoroughly debunked and dismissed in academic studies). To his students and his defenders, Strauss was a great exegete of the classics who brought Plato, Thucydides, Al-Farabi, and Machiavelli to life for a generation of political theorists who had been cut off from anything written prior to Thomas Hobbes. Strauss brought back into academic study and consideration the insights of the classical political tradition shunned by the modern political science of post-Hobbesianism.

Athens, Jerusalem, and all That

Part of Strauss’s fame was his elaboration on the Western dynamic caught up by two cities and the concepts they represented. For Strauss, the Western tradition cannot be lifted out of the indissoluble tension between rationalism and revelation, symbolized by Athens and Jerusalem. The Athenian rationalist tradition, for Strauss, was cut-throat, pragmatic, and suffered from a tension between hubris and realism. The Jerusalemite revelatory tradition, by contrast, was moralistic and zealous but also suffered the tension of hubris and realism, albeit for different reasons. One need only look at the long history of Jewish and Christian messianic movements for how faith could be as equally hubristic as an aspirational form of political apotheosis.

Strauss never believed that there was a peaceful coexistence between reason and revelation. Instead, reason and revelation were at war with each other. This violent dynamic between Athens and Jerusalem was mediated by the ascendant Catholic Church, but that mediation was eventually broken by Machiavelli and the Protestant Reformation—though that mediation was already facing problems with men like Marsilius of Padua and from within the Catholic tradition like with Augustine’s separation of the city of man (rationalism) and the city of God (revelation). Although Strauss does give attention to that Catholic mediation (namely in his short but important reflections on Saint Thomas Aquinas), this mediation is a betrayal of the real dynamic between the two: conflict not synthesis.

Central to Strauss’s thesis on the Western dynamic is the theologico-political problem. What comes first? God or the polis, God or the state, God or the lawgiver, etc. To where do our loyalties orient themselves: the realm of the white rose and the city of divine love or the city of man with its deified lawgiver like Lycurgus, Solon, or Numa – or in the American context where Straussianism thrives as an intellectual movement, the Founding Fathers and Abraham Lincoln? This is the tension between Athens (the city of man) and Jerusalem (the city of God). The highest good in life for the Greeks was political life. The highest good in life for Jews and Christians was the theological and contemplative life (focusing on metaphysics, ontology, aesthetics, and morality, leading to the numerous philosophies and theologies of love that we have inherited). Some Jews and Christians eventually found minority support from a handful of Greek philosophers who maintained intellectual contemplation and politics were compatible goods (namely Plato and Aristotle), but this revision of Plato and Aristotle was exactly that—a revision, and Strauss wanted to reclaim Plato and Aristotle from that revisionism to highlight how the intellectual impetus of Plato and Aristotle was subservient to political ends rather than intellectual ends in of themselves. This division is significant, and in the world of political struggle, it can have serious consequences when contemplating the fall of civilization in an isolated monastery, which takes precedence over the defense of the political order and allows for contemplative mysticism in the first place.

Despite this irreconcilable difference, Strauss maintained that the dynamism and greatness of the West was the dialectic between these two antagonistic traditions. When Athens veered into hubris, Jerusalem was there to reel it back in. When Jerusalem veered into hubris, Athens was there to reel it back in. The medieval conflict between the popes and Holy Roman emperors, the Guelph-Ghibelline conflict, embodied this dynamic of conflict. The outcome of this tension between reason and revelation is compromise, and the population at large benefits from such compromise between the forces of political fanaticism and religious zeal.

What Athens gave to the West was political and military zeal and ingenuity, “daring, progress, and the arts.” What Jerusalem gave to the West was contemplative and spiritual discipline, a yearning for heavenly things, and a deep anthropology that contributed to the study of nature human nature, and created an important place for intellectual contemplation as a serious and noble pursuit in itself instead of the pragmatic, political-oriented, intellectualism of the Greek philosophers. These two forces produced a schizophrenic civilization and human person, but we have all benefited from this dynamic tension between pure politics and contemplative theological anthropology. For instance, the great treasures of Western art are the byproduct of this tension wrestling with each other; take the great art and literature of the West, so much of it influenced by Christian philosophies of love yet commissioned by political leaders to serve the purpose of political propaganda.

Classics and Moderns

The other famous distinction, or dialectic, Strauss drew was between the classics and moderns which is found in his magnum opus, Natural Right and History. Here the classical and Christian traditions were allied but allied only because they shared the same basic anthropology that humanity was social in its nature and had a telos undergirding it. While the Greco-Romans and Christians differed, Strauss noted that it was primarily the Catholic tradition of science and philosophy that kept the disparate visions of Athens and Jerusalem united under the principle of the common good and common understanding of human nature (though never a common or universal culture).

Contrary to popular misinformation, the modern project of philosophy was a complete break from Greek philosophy and not its resurrection. Any undergraduate in philosophy would know this. Yet, paradoxically, in breaking from the Greek philosophical tradition, modernity was also a return to the Greek philosophical tradition—namely, the pre-Socratic tradition of materialist sophistry. While Strauss saw Machiavelli as a forerunner, the culmination of this return to empty materialism and self-preservation as the highest end (read: lowest end) of life was in Hobbes, Locke, and Spinoza. While the moderns turned to the pre-Socratics for inspiration, namely in the assumption that metaphysics begins with nature or matter and not God or the Platonic Ideas/Forms, that’s where the similarity ends. For modern materialism, born out of the Renaissance and early Enlightenment, was guided by Francis Bacon’s New Science of scientific conquest and the transformation and mastery of nature – concepts alien to the pre-Socratic materialists.

In a dazzling exegesis of the so-called “classical liberals,” Strauss highlights how their philosophical outlook is premised on relativism, hedonism, and solitary and atomistic individualism. In rejecting a summum bonum, the classical liberals decisively destroyed the possibility of unity in a society. In promoting hedonism, or lack of bodily harm, as the highest good in life, the classical liberals turned everyone into a robotic copy of each other, destroying all distinctive particularity to life. In considering humans a-social and solitary creatures, the classical liberals denied the possibility of political virtue in its Greco-Roman form centered around patriotism and phronesis, or in its Christian conceptualization through the politics of the common good in service to each other as an expression of loving God (love God and love your neighbor).

Life in the state of nature was terrible. Even in Locke, who was nothing more than “the wolf Hobbes in sheep’s clothing,” as Strauss described him, the classical liberal solution to the problem of a brutish and short life in the state of nature was the imposition of the leviathan overall who came under the tentacles of the social contract. Locke goes as far as to state that part of the responsibility of government is to “decide the rights of the subject, by promulgated standing laws, and known authorized judges.”

Locke, as Strauss showed, is hardly the benign libertarian that he is made out to be on the internet by people who have never understood him (and perhaps haven’t even read him). After all, his rosy state of nature necessarily descends into the state of war, which compels us out of the primal state of existence. Conflict defines an atomized society in a war over the scarcity of resources. Thus, Strauss shows, after many close and intense readings of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, and others, that the logical conclusion of the modern liberal vision moves to “the outlawry of war or the establishment of a world state.” How prescient, all things considered. Even Locke’s political logic is the slow growth of statism—the more “rights” one has, the more power the state must have to enforce those rights “by promulgated standing laws, and known authorized judges,” as Locke himself states, whose legislature must be “sacred and unalterable.” What of Locke’s call for revolution, might one ask? If you read Locke carefully, he never advocates that in the way we moderns think of revolution; Locke’s revolution is a return to government because it has nullified itself, dissolved itself, through its own abuses and living under no government (now that it nullified itself) is the antithesis of our call into the social contract.

The crisis of modernity is, therefore, one of permissive nihilism and encroaching statism. With nothing to call citizens up toward besides comfortable living, the gains won by liberal democracy would be threatened. It was threatened by fascism but managed to survive, something that Strauss focused on in his lecture/essay “On German Nihilism” (1941). In Strauss’s time, liberal democracy was in a struggle with communism. From Strauss’s perspective, communism offered humanity something to be zealous for and strive to achieve. Liberalism, not so much. This would, in turn, Strauss feared, lead to non-communist young adults embracing communism because the apotheotic aspiration of communism was far more alluring than the empty hedonism of liberalism. Strauss wanted to avert this possibility.

Strauss was not an anti-liberal in the manner that Strauss’s critics ignorantly and erroneously charge (and one is often left to wonder if the critics ever bothered to read him). On the contrary, he was a friend to liberal democracy. He believed that the liberal democratic states, for all their metaphysical and philosophical problems, still retained the spirit of classical Athens and acceptance of spiritual matters and religion (even if in a much more depreciated form) in the promise of freedom of religion. Despite the problems of liberalism, Strauss believed that rejuvenating liberal polities with classical virtue ethics would safeguard it from slipping into nihilistic tyranny and from losing the contest with communism. In a world where tyranny was everywhere, liberalism—while in danger of falling into its own tyranny—had the most freedom to confront decadence and despotism from within. Strauss’s hope, then, was that the recovery of classical ideals and virtue would bolster the implicit nihilism and hedonism of liberal thought; this was only possible in liberal polities precisely because of their relative openness. Plato and Aristotle may have been forgotten, but they were not banned. As such, they could be recovered. Strauss was, in fact, a great friend and supporter of American Democracy and was deeply concerned about what would happen to the world if American Democracy decayed, degenerated, and failed to remain steadfast in its opposition to its more authoritarian opponents who followed the single path of creating salvation on earth.

Three Waves of Modernity

In his essay “The Three Waves of Modernity,” Strauss charted the tripartite struggle for modernity as an ideological one. Conservatism need not apply because conservatism was premodern and anti-ideological. The contenders in modernity were liberalism (including many who go by the label “conservative” in today’s world), socialism, and fascism.

Liberalism was marked by the discovery of humanity’s mastery over nature through technology (or what we call “science”). The essence of liberalism was to create safe, pleasant, and harmless lives through the instruments of the new science, “The purpose of science is reinterpreted: propter potentiam, for the relief of man’s estate, for the conquest of nature, for the maximum control, the systematic control of the natural conditions of human life. The conquest of nature implies that nature is the enemy, chaos to be reduced to order; everything good is due to man’s labor rather than to nature’s gift: nature supplies only the almost worthless materials. Accordingly, the political society is in no way natural.” Furthermore, Strauss writes in reflecting over the movement of modern political ideology, “I can here only assert that the increased emphasis on economics is a consequence of this. Eventually we arrive at the view that universal affluence and peace is the necessary and sufficient condition of perfect justice.”

The materialization of life and the triumph of scientistic-economism was the outcome of the first wave of modernity. It was reacted against by the second wave, or socialism. The head of the second wave was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as much a modernist as any Enlightenment philosopher before him.

Rousseau protested on behalf of nature, but he protested on behalf of human nature more than he did the green trees and flowery pastures interrogated on the rack of post-Baconian science, “[Rousseau] protested in the name of virtue, of the genuine, nonutilitarian virtue.” If liberalism was about remaking the world to make humanity’s consumeristic life pleasurable and peaceful, socialism also concurred with liberalism in this regard. Hence, the two movements are bitter enemies. They agree on the same end that “universal affluence and peace is the necessary and sufficient condition of perfect justice.” The difference is that socialism disagreed with the means to the end.

According to Strauss, the discovery of the second wave of modernity was the dissolution of any form of realism in nature. While the assault upon nature commenced in the Renaissance, in the writings of Machiavelli, and especially Francis Bacon, it wasn’t until the aftereffects of the Scientific and Industrial Revolution that the true war on nature was unleashed with the belief that nature was entirely changeable, reducible, destructible. The goal of life wasn’t harmony with nature, wasn’t to be taught by nature, wasn’t to dwell in the beauty of nature; the goal of life was the transformation of nature for the self-pleasure and contentment of man. Technology made this possible. If you refuse to be part of this project, you will be made to journey to a better world whether you want to or not. As Rousseau said in The Social Contract, “whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the whole body, which means nothing other than that he shall be forced to be free.” The world of freedom through the mastery and transformation of nature is the only world that we must create. This was a communal endeavor, not an individualistic one.

While the second wave of modernity came to these conclusions from the spirit of the first wave, the real difference between socialism and classical liberalism was socialism’s moral fire vis-à-vis liberalism’s moral relativism. Here, one can see Strauss laughing like Democritus. While there were some religious socialists, most socialists have been, and remain today, anti-clerical, atheistic, and opponents of religion. Yet they were filled with the moral spirit of Jerusalem, lending credence to the dismissive jeering of socialism as a “religion” or new “theology,” a religious faith for those who have lost their religious belief in a Transcendent Deity like the Christian God. Liberals, in their Athenian and Thrasymachean materialism, were the unintentional heirs of Athens, just like socialists became the unintentional heirs of Jerusalem with their moralism and zeal for reform. The new dialectic of Athens and Jerusalem was between the cut-throat materialism of Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke against the sentimental materialism of Rousseau and his heirs, especially the Romantics. Socialism preached the gospel of techno-sentimentalism, or “scientific socialism,” a transformation of the world for moral ends using the same means and methods as classical liberalism’s transformation of the world purely for the self.

Then Strauss reached his elaboration on fascism, which was the cruelest of all the modern ideologies. Fascism was defined as “the experience of terror and anguish rather than of harmony and peace, and it is the sentiment of historical existence as necessarily tragic.” The perpetual struggle was what would bring humanity happiness. Herd life, the life of the “last men,” was simply to have a full stomach and a warm bed to retire to at night. To the fascist, the emptiness of modernity was where humans lived “without any ideals and aspirations” and simply wanted to be “well fed, well clothed, well housed, well medicated by ordinary physicians and by psychiatrists.”

The seductive danger of fascism was achieved through its synthetic combination of discoveries of the first two waves of modernity. From liberalism, fascism took the cult of technology and science to new levels of repression, interrogation, and control. From socialism, fascism took over criticism of liberalism as morally weak, relativistic, and too self-centered. With the power of technology now in the hands of the Übermensch, the new brave new world of could be made real. The purpose of life was the struggle to make that world a reality since nature and technology called for a world of control to be established. If liberalism was the thesis of modernity and socialism the antithesis to liberalism, then fascism was the synthesis that drew on the discoveries of liberalism and socialism while also rebelling against liberalism and socialism. Far from a “reactionary” movement like the medieval romanticism of the nineteenth century opining for a return to the throne and altar, fascism was an intensely modern and forward-looking movement. Fascism represented the synthesis of liberalism and socialism, the totalizing embodiment of modernist philosophy and science gone awry.

In this contest of ideologies, fascism had fallen with its defeat in 1945. At the time of Strauss’s death, liberalism and socialism remained. From Strauss’ point of view, socialism could have still emerged as the victor when he died in 1973. The ever-present threat of a socialist victory in the ideological wars of modernity and the slow-growing nihilism and relativism that lay at the heart of liberalism was something with which Strauss was extensively and intensely concerned.

Strauss Today

The importance of Strauss for many in the present is in his exceptional classical scholarship and his recognition that in liberalism lay a deep relativism that would exhaust into permissive nihilism. The collapse of moral norms would divide society which was unified by the force of the law under the social contract. With no more external enemy to threaten liberalism, liberalism’s internal contradictions would prove to be its own worst threat. Without the great external foe, liberal polities would grow politically impotent as society relativized itself and liberal states became impotent to act.

Contemporary Straussians, then, tend to be virtue ethicists. They believe in the importance of the classical conception of virtue, either in its Greco-Roman or Catholic flavor, as the great buttress against relativized disintegration. (Strauss follows the classical theorists who, in assessing the decline of classical Greece, latched onto the idea of moral softness and materialism as the primary cause for their degeneration into tyranny, civil war, and eventual conquest—despite their wealth and large militaries—to comparatively poorer entities: Macedon and, eventually, Rome.) Strauss, who knew Oswald Spengler’s thesis in Decline of the West well—he even references Spengler directly in his seminal essay “The Three Waves of Modernity”—feared that without virtue in political life the eventual political impasse of an increasingly decadent, relativistic, and nihilistic West would leave itself open to the return of the politics of force, tyranny, in which the formerly relatively free and open polities of the West would slip into despotism.

Spengler argued that in the final descent of the West’s civilizational death, politics would become so untenable that force would be the only answer to political problems. Caesarism was the future because Caesarism coincides with political and cultural decadence. This is precisely what Strauss feared and was warning against.

Thus, Straussians tend to be conservative only insofar that they understand the enemy of liberalism is itself; more specifically, the hollow relativism embedded in Hobbes and functionally present in Locke, which threatens to destroy the very world that liberalism helped to create, is the enemy within liberalism that must be addressed. The conservative reputation of Strauss is because—unlike fanatical Whigs who do not think we have anything to learn from the past—he saw much wisdom from the ancients to help us with the questions of life, politics, and the destiny of humanity which moderns have shunned or lowered the standards of. Ancients concerned themselves with how humans should live. Moderns, according to Strauss, “start from how men do live.” However, in taking this approach, “one must lower one’s sights” to the lowest common denominator of human existence: self-preservation. Ironically, Strauss is more an idealist than a realist in that he wanted to return to what we could become rather than what we are. The low realism of hedonistic self-interest, which rests at the core of modernistic anthropology and philosophy, does not permit anything beyond this and, therefore, the striving for a superior life (intellectually, morally, aesthetically, spiritually, etc.) disintegrates into an atomistic relativism of everyone pursuing their self-interest which produces weakness within society.

The victory of modernity, the crowning achievement of Whig civilization, is that we simply live and then die alone in a warm bed with three meals a day provided by the state. There is no striving. There is no goal. There is no telos for humanity to consummate. If we live comfortable, peaceful, and pleasant lives, we have won the game of life according to the New Science ideology of modernism. This is why, in the 21^st century, so many children of the victorious liberals of World War II and the Cold War are abandoning liberalism and turning to alternatives that offer them something to strive for.

Those who present Strauss as a closet fascist, a synthetic philosopher of rationalism and religion, a reactionary, or an opponent of liberalism have not read him or portray him in deceptive and misleading ways meant to advance their own grinding axes. In concentrating on classical natural right and the philosophers and historians of Athens, like Plato, Aristotle, and Thucydides, we begin to see the kind of intellectualism that Strauss advocated: a return to the rationalist philosophy of Athens and not the moral revelation of Jerusalem. Why? There is a kernel of moral virtue deep within the atheistic rationalism of Athenian philosophy, and that is the only path amenable to moderns who need saving from their own apathetic nihilism and the totalitarian moralism of utopianism but who cannot accept the love of God and neighbor as the highest good in life because of hyper-individualism, leaving the cultivation of individual virtue in the city of man as the only possibility for moderns. This, however, would require a return to the classics—not to serve the New Jerusalem but to reinvigorate the New Athens. When all is said and done, Strauss endorses the only city he believes truly exists, the city we do, in fact, live in: the city of man.

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The well-known political philosopher of the University of Chicago, Leo Strauss (1899 – 1973), said that liberal education led us toward culture and sought to form a man cultivated in mind and in accordance with his nature.

As we all seem to forget today, the term cultivation comes from the word agriculture, which means to take care of the land so that it produces; in this sense, education would be the cultivation of the mind according to its nature, therefore, it would be absurd for example to cultivate vegetables replacing water, fertilizers or light by other means, that is to say, pouring whiskey instead of water we cannot expect our crop to flourish, in the same way, it is not possible to think about the development of human nature if we do not give it what it requires for its development and wellbeing.

In this sense, teachers would be like farmers of minds dedicated to making them bear fruit.
However, as the great teachers (those great minds who were not the disciples of any previous teacher) are even scarcer to be found than the teachers themselves (who are not abundant compared to the farmers), this would be a severe problem. Still, one with an immediate solution, for although we do not have the teachers in flesh and blood, we do find them in their texts, that is to say, through the reading of the so-called “Great Books.”

Thus, “liberal education will then consist in the careful and proper study of the great texts which the great minds have left us, a study in which the more experienced pupils assist the less experienced pupils, including the beginners.”

The term liberal education might initially generate some confusion for those who are not familiar with Strauss’s work or who are not situated in the world of political philosophy. We should not confuse the adjective liberal with the noun liberal.

When Strauss speaks of liberals, he refers to the adjective. A liberal is a person who practices liberality (generosity). For this, he must be a person with certain wealth but who uses it in a moderate way. That is to say, he enjoys it but also shares it with those who need it without losing it or squandering it because, in that case, he would cease to be liberal (practicing generosity).

Liberalism, as a noun, can simply be called an ideology that is identified with freedoms or rights, such as freedom of the press or freedom of expression, and appeared in the 19th century.

Clearly, liberal education is not the training of individual rights defenders but rather of citizens and human beings capable of fully developing their natural potential.

Following the classical literature, we could say that liberal education differentiates a free man from a slave (passions).  The full understanding of the meaning of liberal education can be found, for example, in the literature of Plato (The Laws and The Republic), Aristotle (Politics), and Xenophon (Education of Cyrus), as stated precisely in a passage found in Plato’s Laws: “liberal education is education from childhood in virtue, and which inspires the ardent desire to become a perfect citizen who knows how to govern and how to be governed with justice.”

Certainly, two dimensions can be perceived in liberal education. The first one advocates a moral and religious education linked to the constitution of good citizens, as one would say, an education of the heart, while the other, more transcendent, corresponds to philosophy, to the education of the mind found, for example, in the seventh book of The Republic.

Following the classics, civic education was thus based on the formation of character to achieve virtue.

For example, Aristotle understood that the virtues (courage, affability, for example) were all those qualities necessary to be able to develop our human nature fully and that this was possible through the help of the city, hence the close relationship between ethics (which is nothing more than the formation of character) and politics. In contrast, the philosopher’s training was much more demanding in the sense that the search for knowledge has no limits and could, therefore, be fundamentally dangerous.

The essence of philosophy is permanent doubt, so in this respect, it can be seen as antagonistic to authority. The philosopher then had to write in an esoteric manner to mislead authority and thus conceal his true intentions.

There is no doubt that the liberal education of the philosopher, based on dialectics, is fundamentally more important than civic education. Still, we also know that without civic education, there is no point in talking about the cultivation of the mind (without a city, there is no philosophy).

Civic education, i.e. education that moderates the character and curbs the instincts, also inculcating patriotic or moral values, is significant for the progress of the city, in fact, civic education would be the prelude to the development of philosophy.

Strauss also thought that liberal education would serve to shape a good political regime in accordance with human nature, which also made sense of the following definition of liberal education: “Liberal education is the ladder by which we try to climb from mass democracy to democracy as it was originally“.

Democracy had to be understood as the government of free men as opposed to the mass democracy that would be constituted by those men not yet formed by civic education. Democracy, in fact, would be the regime that stands or falls by virtue:

“… democracy is a regime in which all or most of the adults are men of virtue, and as virtue seems to require knowledge, a regime in which all or most are virtuous or wise, or the society in which all or nearly all have developed their reason to a high degree, or the rational society. Democracy, in a word, becomes an aristocracy which has expanded into a universal aristocracy“.

However, as Strauss rightly pointed out, the predominance of political science in these times has served to make us see democracy exclusively in merely descriptive terms, appearing more as a procedure that serves, for example, to elect public servants in a competition open to all, in which public posts are contested, rather than as a form of government whose means and ends are virtue, that is, in a normative way, as political philosophy put it.

In this sense, it is understandable why, today, still under the influence of positivist discourse, the scientific thesis of democracy dominates, and thus, the concept of democracy as mass participation, as mass democracy, is assumed. This mass democracy, in turn, generates a mass culture that is achieved with the least intellectual or moral effort and lacks aspirations of transcendence. As Strauss pointed out, the people formed by mass culture are satisfied reading the sports page or the jokes page of the newspapers, but they can hardly be interested in public affairs, let alone be in a position to hold public office.

Evidently, the fact that our society is in crisis and its political institutions completely disqualified is an unmistakable symptom that mass culture and mass democracy have imposed themselves and that this situation is not gratuitous. In fact, this occurs when the spaces for forming and cultivating people, such as the family, the school, and the university, lose their meaning and purpose, thus abandoning their task of forming free and responsible men and women. Such an event only forces us to turn our eyes towards this form of education, which, amid our desolate panorama, appears as a resplendent oasis waiting to serve those who dare to reach out to it.

Sources: 

Hilail, Gildin (ed.). An Introduction to Political Philosophy, ten essays by Leo Strauss. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1975.

Horwitz, Robert H. The Moral Foundations of the American Republic. Buenos Aires: Editorial Rei, 1986.

Pangle, Thomas L. The Ennobling of Democracy, the challenge of postmodern age. Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.

“What is Liberal Education?”, in: An Introduction to Political Philosophy, ten essays by Leo Strauss. Gildin, Hilail (editor). Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1975. p. 311.

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Every time you make yourself a cup of coffee, maybe while standing nearly lifeless (or half dead) in front of that coffee pot on a particularly dismal Monday morning, it is not difficult to take it for granted that the coffee is there. It’s so obviously there, so how could it be otherwise? But in its thereness, the metaphysical question of being applies. Being is. But how come? However, maybe that coffee is not so very obvious after all. All effects obscure their causes, although, yes, sometimes causes obscure their effects. The truth is, we get used to things, and when we do, it gets easier to take them for granted without gratitude.

I don’t need to tell you, but I will anyway, that coffee is a popular drink. Every year, nearly two and a half billion cups of coffee are consumed worldwide, and at least half of those are by my brother-in-law. But this wasn’t always the case, especially before my brother-in-law turned five. If history had worked out a little differently, maybe we’d all be obsessed with something else entirely, like, say, mint tea. At one point in history, coffee was thought of as a “bitter invention of Satan.” It was shunned in the West because no one wants to end up demonically possessed by a beverage.

Legend has it that coffee was discovered around the year 850 A. D. by a poetically inclined Ethiopian goat herder named Kaldi. Kaldi saw that his goats would all gravitate towards a kind of cherry tree and that, after eating its berries, the goats would be noticeably more energetic. Kaldi tried the cherries himself, and he felt just heck-gosh-darn-it marvelous. Poetry flowed out of him, and his eyes widened to a world of wonders in a new way. He began waxing Heideggerian about how man is not the lord of being, but the shepherd of being, and that was long before Heidegger showed up to confuse philosophy undergraduates.

Kaldi brought the cherries to an Islamic monastery where its devout dwellers experimented until the first form of coffee came into existence. As you would expect, when such a miracle is discovered, it spreads quickly. Not everyone was a fan, but, in general, coffee began to trend. When the West caught a whiff of the stuff, this ambivalent stance towards it continued. A mix of fascination and terror. The criticism seemed to outweigh praise until Pope Clement the 8th tried coffee and said these great words: “This Satan’s drink is so delicious that it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it.”

Well, thank Clement for that. But all of this brings me to the horrible realization I had today that my coffee had cooled down while I was reflecting on the history of coffee. I realized as that cold coffee touched my lips and as I shuddered at the brutality of that experience that we are often so busy getting caught in the vortex of the twenty-four-hour news cycle or the details of the history of some or other beverage that we forget that just by contemplating coffee long enough, we might end up proving the existence of God and better understanding something of modern politics. It’s easier to do so, in fact, when you notice how your coffee changes. So, let’s contemplate change for a moment, shall we? We’ll get to the theology and politics of it in a moment.

Everything changes, you know. Things that are once were not, and will one day not be again. You and I are included in this, I’m afraid. And change can happen in different ways. Filling my cup: a quantitative change. Spilling my coffee: a location change. Coffee cooling down: qualitative change. Digesting the coffee: substantial change to the coffee and, although debatable, to me. Change would occur even if we lived in a simulation, and for that reason, it would need to be explained.

If I were drinking my coffee with Aristotle or St. Thomas, they would remind me that change involves the actualization of a potential. It involves making real what could be real. Coffee has the potential to get cold. I can heat it up again, too, but I’m too busy writing this thing to do that. All created beings are a mixture of actuality and potentiality, and these facets of being interact with each other. They interactualise. For a potential to be made real, something that possesses a certain actualizing power has to impart that actuality to what doesn’t have it, as when the room’s temperature cools the coffee down. Everything needs a real changer for change to happen.

Now, to make this very straightforward fact more interesting, let’s think of an isolated moment in the life of some coffee. The coffee is on my desk, next to me. It is approximately three feet off the ground because of the desk. The desk is approximately three meters from the ground because my house is on the first floor of a block of flats, and the block of flats is supported by a foundation, which is supported by the ground, under which is the turbulence and tormenting heat of lava, and so on. I’m thinking vertically here about the fact that the coffee is where it is in space and not just in time because it is dependent on other things, which are dependent on other things, which are dependent on yet other things. And so on. The coffee has no power on its own to be where it is. The coffee can only be where it is because it depends on the desk, and the desk can only be where it is because it depends on the floor.

I mention this more vertical way of thinking, from cup to table to floor to building to foundation to ground, and so on, because I don’t want you to make the mistake of thinking that we require something like an initial starting point, like a big bang, for all of this to exist as it does. Aristotle, for instance, believed in the Carl-Saganancity of a universe that always ways and will always be, as if time itself is not a creature, although I think it is.

An atemporal or vertical way of thinking about coffee helps us consider how various actualities depend on other actualities, which depend on other actualities in turn. Change cannot happen apart from this atemporal dependence. Moreover, each thing, which depends on other things at any given moment, clearly is not self-sustaining and self-supporting and so requires something else, which in turn is not self-sustaining or self-supporting. This is true at the microscopic and subatomic levels, too, as we dive into the coffee, its water and caffeine, molecules and atoms and quarks and gluons, and so on.

The obvious contingency of the thing—the fact that it is not self-supporting—doesn’t disappear but becomes increasingly glaringly apparent the more you look at things. Not only does nothing fully account for itself, but nothing self-actualizes itself, including the subjects of Maslowian psychology. All potentials are actualized by things that are not the thing itself, even quite apart from some historical-temporal explanation. The potential of my coffee cup to be there, feet off the ground, is actualized, for instance, by the table it is on.

Now think, as much as you are able to, about everything. Think about the sum total of everything that exists. Metaphysically, we are asking about all of that, all of us included. If I am walking in a forest and I happen to come across a giant cup of coffee floating inexplicably in the middle of a beautiful clearing without apparent reason or support, I would be likely to ask the question of how it got there. Well, while that is no doubt disturbingly inexplicable, it is no less strange that there is anything at all here rather than nothing. It would be weird for a giant, unsupported coffee cup to be in the middle of a clearing in the forest, but it is far weirder that there is a giant, unsupported universe right in the middle of—well, in the middle of what exactly?

Here we are, and here everything is, and when you really think about it, rather than just taking it for granted, you discover that it is rather strange that anything exists at all, especially since everything in the system of the entire universe is clearly not a self-supporting thing. And it isn’t good enough to merely state the fact of everything’s self-evident presence, as scientistic atheists do, because the description in itself is not an explanation. If someone dies drinking poisoned coffee, as someone does in Keigo Higashino’s thoroughly enjoyable novel Salvation of a Saint, merely describing the crime scene is not sufficient to solve the question of who poisoned the victim and why. In other words, answering any question at one level is hard to answer on the required levels for the answer to be sufficient.

Nothing we know of in the universe is self-supporting, so why would the universe itself be self-supporting? It will also not do to constantly point to causes of change that are themselves open to change because then you have to simply point to another cause for change, which is itself also changing and changeable because, in that case, we are dealing not just with infinite regress but with the silly idea that just because you add yet another level to your hierarchy of being that you have in fact solved the problem—because you really haven’t. All you have done is defer it. This is why mechanical explanations don’t ultimately destroy mystery. Just because you know how a machine works doesn’t mean you have properly understood the mystical presence of the machine itself.

My point is this. We’re not just interested in what changes our coffee from warm to cold coffee. We are interested in why coffee exists in this very moment, as isolated from all other moments. We’re also not just asking about the chemical composition of coffee because that doesn’t answer the question; it merely rephrases it. We’re not thinking about history because that’s just another way to defer the question of being. We are asking the metaphysical question: Why is there coffee instead of nothing?

What actualizes the potential of the sum total of everything in the coffee as well as everything that is the universe? We’re interested in what actualizes the universe itself (and the coffee): what actualizes anything’s potential to be, given that everything is so obviously loaded with potential? We don’t really need to ask about the whole universe at all and how it came to be, of course. We need only ask about any simple, everyday thing, like a cup of coffee. Its thereness is astonishing, isn’t it?

To avoid infinite regress, we can now posit that there must be an Unactualised Actualiser, or what Aristotle calls the Unmoved Mover. We need something that is so actual that it does not have any potential at all. As soon as something has a potential, after all, it would require something else to actualize that potential, and that would merely put us on the cosmic infinite regress path all over again. Thus, the Unactualised Actualiser would have to be absolutely unchangeable. It would need to have no parts because if it had parts, it would be dependent upon those parts for its existence, and we’d end up with yet more regress. It must be so real that it does not require anything else to explain its own reality.

If we’re taking the natural order of things as seriously as I’m trying to, then this is the only logical explanation available to any of us regarding why there is something rather than nothing, at least insofar as change is our main consideration. If you decide to contest this logic, your own logic would need to be on the basis of a more logical possibility.

We can, of course, simply settle for the fact that everything just is. We, at least most of us, can believe our senses and accept that they are not lying to us. But if we want an explanation and if we trust the basic inferential logic of how things depend on other things and that the sum total of all dependent things must require something singular and independent upon which everything can rest, it is not just possible but necessary to trust that an Unmoved Mover is the only possible answer. It is a logical necessity.

There are myriad ways to fine-tune the above argument, which is really the shortest version of it I could give without risking boring you. But I have another reason for bringing this up. And that reason is political. Because politics always rests on some or other metaphysics. This metaphysical division of being into actuality, the technical name being act, and potentiality, the technical name being potency, suggests a fantastic array of powers of actualization and potentiality.

Even in our most basic understanding of the world, we know that there are harmonious and inharmonious ways that act and potency can interact. Here’s a harmonious interactualisation: I drink the coffee, which ignites a little spark in me, and I move on to enjoy my day. Here’s an inharmonious version of this: I drink several cups of coffee in a row, and soon enough, I feel insanely anxious, become restless, get a headache, get dizzy, and my heart rate goes nuts. The political dimension of this simple interaction with coffee would be that my interactions with others, as now affected by my interaction with coffee, could be better or worse, depending on the proportion between actuality and potentiality in this specific interaction. Harmony, which is what we should be aiming for and which the ancients described in terms of the life of virtue, involves difficulties in our interactions, too, such as the difficulty of getting out of bed and making coffee. Why does it not make itself? Ah, yes, I’ve already implied an explanation for that.

Well, politics is much more complicated than this, of course. But you get the idea. It’s a matter not just of what interacts but also of a certain proportion between the things that interact. In some places and times, there has been harmony. As suggested in the Genesis story in the bible, harmony is achievable in terms of how certain aspects of creation allow for and limit each other. In her marvelous book, The Need for Roots, Simone Weil uses this principle to discuss certain needs for the soul, noting that “needs are arranged in antithetical pairs and have to combine together to form a balance. Man requires food but also an interval between his meals; he requires warmth and coolness, rest, and exercise. Likewise, in the case of the soul’s needs.” She notes our soul needs a political order that balances liberty and responsibility, equality and hierarchism, honor and punishment, truth and freedom of opinion, security, and risk, as well as private property and collective property.

Arguably, there are reasonable ways to consider all such things. But, in our time, something glaringly bothersome makes even reasonable consideration close to impossible.

It’s worth noting that there are also things that have a certain kind of existence that are completely imaginary. Let’s imagine, say, coffee that tastes exactly like tea. I can throw these antithetical ideas together quite easily to create a pure logical possibility. This is not a real potential, of course, because it is not grounded in the nature of real things. It is fiction, which, even to be a fiction, must exist somewhere—that is, in my mind—even if it isn’t truly realizable. If my coffee really tasted like tea, it would actually be tea and not coffee. Just because it is thinkable does not mean it is actualisable.

Technically, then, we are dealing here with something that has so little actuality that it is nearly completely all potentiality. If a person were to believe that one can really actualize something that has no being, he would essentially be equating himself with the ultimate actuality. He would quite literally be thinking of himself as equal to God, who is not a mere logical potential but a logical necessity. While I grant that you may not accept the existence of God on the basis of anything like what I have said, even so, the vast majority of people would agree, given the degrees of actualizing power readily and even obviously perceptible in the world, that to assume the ability to call a new nature into existence by what amounts to sheer will is a rather astonishing sort of hubris.

But it is this very hubris that is at the heart of the entire liberal political project.  To look at our current political moment both metaphysically and historically, we start to see that alarmingly far back, even before Sartre inverted essence and existence, the modern project was already obsessively concerned with falsification. The idea that we can only determine what is true after antagonizing being, which is what modern science does, is already to place actuality at the service of potentiality. But this idea leaked into everything, including theology, philosophy, and culture.

Way back, the conception of personhood in the heads of nominalists, even before Descartes, was already tending to think of logical possibility—meaning a pure object of thought without any material being—as superior in a way to potency proper. The conception of personhood at play was one of pure thought imaginatively but not actually cut off from reality. It was a blank slate before Locke and Rousseau. It was, in short, a fiction. Its reality was rooted not in being and its natural division of act and potency but in the mind, which can easily invert that division without even noticing that it is an inversion.

Politics, for a long time now, has been de-ontologized. It’s why it’s so easy to get caught up in political discussions that have almost nothing to do with actual political concerns; that is, with what it means to live well in the world, given that we interact with and intellectualize each other, and given that we even have the potential to denigrate each other if we cannot perceive harmonious interactions wisely. Theoretical relations are now more commonly entertained than real relations.

Sure, you could look at this lengthy meditation and accuse me of doing the same. But, part of why I have traversed the whole universe, from my coffee cup to God to the realm of the political, is because I ultimately have a very simple point to make. The political has to be, in the richest sense, universal. But the truly universal is not a false universal absolutely ripped from context. It is intimate as well. It pertains to various actualities and how they play off each other and give of themselves to each other. It pertains to the lives we really live. And the truth is that where the so-called political yanks us away from concrete particulars, it is no longer really political. It destroys the tensions between those antithetical pairs that Weil mentions without even considering what they mean, we cannot figure out what it means to live together, and we cannot possibly encounter wholeness. Right now, what is being sacrificed for the sake of so many fictions, the absolute fiction of money included, is everything from families to nations to harmonious geopolitical solutions, all in the name of reconceptualizing the world as a realm of pure artificiality.

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Strangely, Strauss appears to be more of a modern than a classicist in his understanding of nature as a forerunner to positivism. According to Brague, the concept of nature underwent a transformation that not only banished divinity from itself but also expelled divinity from the concept of law. The modern period is characterized as a period where humans became fully autonomous in their ethical, economic, and political actions. The law no longer required divinity: it was legislated by and for human beings.

Mathematics, and to a lesser extent, the natural sciences, became the model of causality and, later of nature itself. For Brague, Descartes was the first thinker who sought to understand nature as a mathematical entity: nature was conceived of as laws instead of rights (LG, 234). The law of nature was one of motion without telos: there was no prime mover with which nature sought unity (LG, 234).27 With the rise of “scientific law” mathematical physics, both the concepts of nature and law moved away from an Aristotelian ontology to a scientific causality. By the time of the sixteenth century, the law was understood as natural in the sense it was a type of motion that was neither violent nor accidental; as Hooker wrote, “That which doth assigne unto each thing the kinde, that which doth moderate the force and power, that which doth appoint the forme and measure of working, the same we tearmed a Lawe” (LG, 235).

Coinciding with the change in the concept of nature was the change in the concept of divinity. Descartes still required a God for his law of nature to work, but it was a God characterized by its omnipotence rather than by its teleology: “The lawgiver of nature is freed from His own laws” (LG, 235). Descartes asserted that “it is God who has established the laws of nature [as eternal mathematical truths], as a King establishes laws in his Kingdom,” with such a law of nature “inborn in our minds, as a king would establish law in the hearts of his subjects if he had power enough to do so” (LG, 235). The law of God therefore was the law of nature, making the normative and the descriptive one and the same, but removing nature’s teleological drive towards the divine.

By the time of Hobbes, the law of nature still was the law of God, but it had become plural. This shift from the singular to the plural removed the notion of a universal order and was replaced by a universal science of constant and observable relations. This new science no longer searched for causes or, as Auguste Comte wrote, “the inaccessible determination of causes—that is, for the constant relations that exist between observable phenomena” (LG, 235). God was re-conceived as the clock-maker deity and eventually became superfluous to any claim to observe the regularities that exist in nature. The notion of the “laws” of nature was replaced in the nineteenth century by mathematical equations or vaguely-formed principles. Nature thus was no longer understood as the general laws of God, whether singular or plural, but as a phenomenon of uniform motion that was regular, observable, and ultimately purposeless.

Law in the strict sense was no longer conceived of as natural and, therefore, was entirely human, as Spinoza claimed: a law is “a prescribed rule of conduct (ratio vivendi) that man prescribes for himself or that he prescribes for others with some aim in mind” (LG, 238). Montesquieu continued in Spinoza’s footsteps with his Esprit des lois, where he remarked, “Laws, taken in the broadest meaning, are the necessary relations deriving from the nature of things. Law in the general is human reason insofar as it governs all people of earth” (LG, 238–9). The law was entirely a human invention. If there were any association of divinity attached to the law, it was the result of clever people; as Montesquieu wrote, “Any law, without which [society] could not exist, becomes by that token a divine law” (LG, 240). Earlier, Machiavelli had made a similar observation about how civil authority required divine authority regardless of its truth. The divine was the recourse of clever people who wanted to establish laws that went beyond what was commonly accepted. Although the law was not divine, it still needed divinity not because it was true but rather because it provided the foundational legitimacy for the state (LG, 240).28

According to Brague, Austin was the last example of one who resorted to a notion of divinity to support his theory of legislation. In The Province of Jurisprudence Determined, Austin asserted that “the divine law is the measure or test of positive law and morality,” with God defined as “the intelligent and rational Nature which is the soul and guide of the universe” (LG, 240). However, humans recognized the divine law not as something revealed but rather as derived from the principle of general utility, for positive law was “fashioned on the law of God as conjectured by the light of utility” (LG, 240–1). What was commonly demanded was what God had demanded. By invoking God as the standard of positive law and equating Him with the principle of general utility, Austin did not have to appeal to the “ambiguous and misleading” law of nature (LG, 240–1).

Austin’s notion of divinity was so vague that the contents of it could be arranged by humans to suit themselves, while at the same time he discarded the notion of nature as a standard and thereby also the requirement that humans subject themselves to it. Previously, the concept of nature had been stripped of any idea of divinity; now, it had been emptied of any notion of mathematical and logical causality to which humans would have to submit themselves. All that remained was an entity to be prodded and exploited by humans for the principle of general utility. The scientific method and the instrumentalization of the divine had emptied nature of any meaningful content for either law or human beings.

The Emptying of Divinity

If nature had become emptied of any meaningful content, then the divine would have transformed from Aristotle’s prime mover to Kant’s legislator. The elimination of divinity’s magnetic attraction for nature, as informed by nous, would result in a deontological ethics of self-imposed duties. According to Brague, this transformation started with the Protestant Reformation, with Luther’s return to St. Paul’s polemic concerning faith alone against the law. Although Luther redirected the polemic against the Roman Catholic Church with an understanding of grace as the unmerited favor of God, he also emphasized the law as being an essential aspect of Christianity, such as in his teaching of the two kingdoms (LG, 242).29 Christianity came to be perceived in juridical categories, with Jesus known as the Lawgiver, to both the defenders and critics of Christianity.

The tendency to place law at the center of religion found its culmination in the works of Kant, who re-conceptualized ethics as commandments. The moral law that commanded someone, with no hope to appeal, has no need of a source, even if that source were God Himself (LG, 243). Morality consequently did not rest on a religious foundation—in fact, religion rested on the foundation of morality. Kant wrote of “the recognition of all duties as divine commands, not as sanctions, i.e., arbitrary and contingent ordinances of a foreign will, but as essential laws of any free will as such.” However, “even as such, they must be regarded as commands of the Supreme Being, because we can hope for the highest good (to strive for which is made our duty by the moral law) only from a morally perfect (holy and beneficent) and omnipotent will; and, therefore, we can hope to attain it only through harmony with this will” (LG, 243). Like Strauss, Kant required a type of “faith” in an omnipotent God and in the immortality of the soul in order for his philosophy to operate.

Kant’s conception of God was the author of divine commandments. Human obligation towards one’s fellow being started from these commandments, which Kant called “statutory commandments.” But the actual legislators of moral commandments were human beings themselves: God was the author of divine legislation, but moral legislation was self-created and self-directed by human conscience. The moral commandments required the statutory commandments to clarify certain matters, such as the worship of God, but ultimately they were from the human and not from the divine. Religion was nothing “but laws” for Kant—a simple appendix to morality (LG, 244). The divine had been reduced to law, and the functional source of that law resided in human conscience.

After the French Revolution, the connection between divinity and law resurfaced, but in a historical context. The historical study of law arose in reaction to the fabricated juridical rules born of the French Revolution that Burke had criticized. This school of thought emphasized the organic development of law as a historical process. Brague concentrates on three thinkers to represent this turn in Western thought: Henry Sumner Maine in England, Johann Jakob Bachofen in German Switzerland, and Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges in France. Believing in the notions of progress and evolution, these three thinkers pushed divinity back to its primitive origins and reduced it to a phenomenon from which humans had escaped in order to pursue a purely rational and systematic law for modern Western civilization.

Maine modeled his historical method after the natural sciences and concluded that the idea of the natural originated in the need to find principles to integrate foreigners, who had no legal status, into ancient Rome (LG, 245–6). The Roman ius gentium was combined with the Greek notion of physis to solve this problem, with the family as the starting unit for law. Although religion never appeared as a theme, it did surface as something associated with law throughout his works, particularly with canon law. Maine recognized that the divinity prescribed certain laws; however, the divinity in his overall account was something from which humans and the law should escape. The history of law was one of the individual liberating himself over time from various group units to his autonomous, independent self. Bachofen conceived of history progressively but differently in content when compared to Maine: history was the march from a maternal and material principle to the paternal and immaterial ones (LG, 246–7). Initially, there was one great law that governed all of humankind, and this one great law was associated with the religion of Mother Earth and Her notion of equality. This law of equality was older than the positive law of the state but has now been supplanted by the paternal and immaterial law of humankind’s historical progress. Like Maine, Bachofen recognized the divine origins of the law and also dismissed it as a relic of a primitive and no longer needed civilization.

Coulanges also concurred with Maine and Bachofen that the law was initially religious, with the familial existing before the civic (LG, 246–7). No human invented the law: the law was presented to humankind without being sought. A direct and necessary consequence of religious belief, the law applied itself to the relations among all people. The ancient law was never explained, written, or taught: it was learned in the religious rituals of a people. Contrary to Rousseau’s contention, the law was not the work of a legislator but was imposed on the legislator. However, Coulanges, like the others, argued for the inherent limitations in the ancient law and rejected it for a more progressive—rational and systematic—account of law for the civilization of his day.

Conclusion

The emptying of the conception of divinity reduced God to human conscience and later to primitive civilization, while the emptying of the conception of nature reduced its teleology to Austin’s entity of ambiguity and purposelessness. The emptying of these concepts yielded a positivist (or what Brague calls “sociological”) study of both legal and religious phenomena (LG, 248). Setting aside all claims of the validity of the object he studies, the positivist reduces notions of divinity, nature, and law to mere opinions. The irony is that the positivist can follow the development and path of these opinions, but he himself is unable to leave any mark on history because he has nothing to say about the truth of what he is studying.

Strauss seems to be following the positivist’s path, although he would reject the claim that he only wrote about opinions. Rather, it would appear that Strauss believed the positivist program would yield objective truth claims, such as a theory of natural rights, which would have no essential need for divinity. Strauss’s criticism of Weber, the great sociological positivist, was that he “never proved that the unassisted human mind is incapable of arriving at objective norms.”30 For Strauss, natural right could be discovered by the unassisted human mind, i.e., without divinity, if only one were able to pursue this aim for his entire life. This claim is a genuine possibility and, as Brague has traced in his book, represents where we are today. Whether this project is possible is something on which Brague refuses to comment.

Where Brague and Strauss disagree is in their interpretation of Greek philosophy. For Brague, nature was a repository of divinity for the Greeks, a position that is contrary to Strauss’s. An examination of Aristotle’s physei dikaion and its related concepts of physis, nous, phronesis, and spoudaios suggest that Brague’s interpretation is more accurate than Strauss’s. However, Brague’s account of physis is also deficient because he fails to note its dual teleological structure: it seeks to realize its own essence as well as its unity with the prime mover. Brague’s neglect of the prime mover as related to the Greek concept of physis, and his neglect of Aristotle more generally, has been remedied by my analysis of Aristotle’s account of nature and its relationship to the modern notion.

Notes

27. Brague recognizes this change in the conception of nature in terms of its teleology, thereby making his neglect of Aristotle’s “right by nature” all the more perplexing.

28. As Brague later notes, this explains why both Rousseau and the French Revolution sought a return to the sacrality of the laws when establishing a new regime.

29. For example, Brague cites Zwingli as one who returned to Old Testa- ment Law in his Protestant Christianity. Strangely, Brague neglects Calvin, who would be the best example and evidence of this argument.

30. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 70.

The post Nomos, Nature, and Modernity in Brague’s The Law of God (Part Three) appeared first on The Miskatonian.

Aristotle’s right by nature (physei dikaion) was where “everywhere [it] has the same force and does not exist by people’s thinking this or that . . . and yet it is changeable—all of it (kineton mentoi pan).13 Thus, Aristotle’s physei dikaion appeared self-contradictory, where it was valid everywhere and always, but it was also everywhere changeable. One possible solution was that Aristotle wrote esoterically, although it is not clear what would be the hidden truth.14 A more likely answer was that Aristotle meant what he wrote and left it to us to figure out what he meant by physei dikaion as being both universal and contingent.

On the one hand, Aristotle argued that physei dikaion was universal: it had the same force everywhere in forbidding such acts as murder and theft. On the other hand, physei dikaion was changeable in the sense that universal principles can have diverse actualizations according to time, object, aim, and method. The criteria of time, object, aim, and method allowed us to make the distinction between killing and murder. If certain acts fell short of or exceeded this criterion (the mean), then they were considered bad, for as Aristotle wrote, “There is neither a mean of excess and deficiency, nor excess and deficiency of a mean.”15

Murder consequently did not break some abstract rule, but it missed the mean for concrete action. Although the criteria of time, object, aim, and method may appear vague, e.g., “Do not kill at the wrong time, involving the wrong object, with the wrong purpose and method,” for Aristotle, it was appropriate to a reality that did not yield a permanent, detailed standard. Moral and ethical acts were not governed “by any art or set of precepts” but rather “according to right reason” because what was right was “not one, nor the same for all.”16 Each situation must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis with the underlying universal substance of ethics—the one way of being good—driving all of the means.

This paradox of physei dikaion was personified in the mature person (spoudaios) who saw “the truth in each class of things, being as it were the norm and measure of them” and who possessed the virtue of practical wisdom (phronesis) that included other virtues, for “with the presence of the one quality, practical wisdom, will be given all the excellences.”17 Like physei dikaion, Aristotle defined phronesis paradoxically: its possessor had the “ability to deliberate well about what sorts of things conduce to the good life in general” but could produce “no demonstration” of its first principles, even though its particular actions were true in practice.18 Phronesis could not become a science (episteme) because it was bogged down in the particulars of the world, yet, at the same time, it required deliberation of what was generally good.

This paradox of phronesis can be somewhat clarified by looking at Aristotle’s concept of nous (intellect) as both divine and human. Nous was “something divine” and superior to “our composite nature,” but it also “more than anything else is man.” By following nous, humans could make themselves immortal and “strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us.”19 Thus, Aristotle discovered that human beings possessed something within themselves that was different from them and yet paradoxically was the best thing of them—something superior to humans, which they were able to locate through a cognitive faculty that Aristotle termed nous. By making this cognitive faculty both human and divine, Aristotle had shifted divinity from the anthropomorphic gods to the intellectual faculty of the human soul.

It is clear that Aristotle believed in a divinity that was superior to but connected with humans. He wrote that there were “things much more divine in nature even than man,” which included not only the heavenly bodies but also the creator god as a physical force.20 In the Metaphysics, Aristotle also stated that “first philosophy” studies ontology, eternal causes, and the “first mover” god who was “in a better state” than humans.21 However, this “first mover” was not a creator god. Aristotle conceived of it as a final cause and not as one who set things in motion. The prime mover therefore was not the cause of the world, but the preservation of it by its rational and love-inspiring attraction.22 Thus, for Aristotle, the notion of divinity had shifted from the anthropomorphic gods to both the human intellect and the prime mover, the two of which were different yet attracted to each other.

Nature therefore was all of reality’s present form moving towards the prime mover. Defining nature as a member of “the class of causes that acts for the sake of something,” Aristotle declared that the “form” of any reality and the “mover” of any nature often coincide.23 If nature could become identical with divinity, then it would be both natural and divine. Like nous, nature was both divine and non-divine in its composition, with the latter being drawn towards the former. This claim rested upon the human reflection of their nous: “The object of our search is this—what is the commencement of movement in the soul? The answer is evident: as in the universe, so in the soul, it is God. For in a sense, the divine element in us moves everything.”24 As a result of this conceptualization of nature, Aristotle’s physei dikaion was the attraction that humans have both physically and ethically to the prime mover.

The apparent contradiction in Aristotle’s physei dikaion—it was universal in force but changeable in action—was resolved by his understanding of nature’s being everything and everywhere and having a dual final cause at the same time. All of reality sought unity with the prime mover and for what it was supposed to be. For humans, the path to unity with the prime mover was through nous: humans were to follow a single ethical direction with various adjustments made to remain on this path. Virtue was not obedience to abstract rules but following practical wisdom (phronesis) as led by the primer mover’s pull. Phronesis consequently was the motion between the primer mover and humans that occurred within the nous of the mature person (spoudaios).

Strauss, Brague, and Greek Philosophy

Given the variability of phronesis, Aristotle denied it the status of science (episteme) while categorizing it as a deliberate intellectual virtue. The universal-variable principle of phronesis, the many practical paths towards the prime mover in ethical action, precluded logical and consistent proofs. But the universality of the objective was unchanged, which allowed the spoudaios to make decisions rooted neither in relativism nor deontology but something in between as a physei dikaion. However, if physei dikaion cannot be studied at the level of episteme, how can it be demonstrated, especially with regard to Strauss’s and Brague’s differing understandings of nature’s relation to divinity? Is a theory of natural rights only accessible by an autonomous reason that uncovers a nature devoid of divinity? Or does a theory of natural right rest upon an account where both nature and reason are consubstantial with divinity?

The impossibility of studying physei dikaion at the level of episteme certainly restricts the types of demonstration of its existence where the objects of natural reason can be known as the “experiences as can be had by all men at all times in broad daylight.” Such an account of physei dikaion cannot be verified by the positivism that Strauss seemed to advocate or that modern science demands. Deductive and logical reasoning are also avenues that are blocked, since physei dikaion has no axioms from which one can reason to conclusions or first principles. By relying upon habituation in virtue and the experience of a mature person to make correct judgments, physei dikaion is beyond the grasp of those who are neither virtuous nor mature. In short, the traditional demonstrations are not available for the proof of physei dikaion.

The demonstration of physei dikaion is the same as the demonstration of nous as something both human and divine. To repeat from above, Aristotle wrote about his claim of nous, “The object of our search is this—what is the commencement of movement in the soul? The answer is evident: as in the universe, so in the soul, it is God. For in a sense, the divine element in us moves everything.”25 Aristotle appealed to a philosophical introspection of human experience for the demonstration of nous and, one could infer from his other statements, for physei dikaion, too. The acknowledgment that an action is ethical—that it is right by nature—can be verified by others not through empirical, mathematical, or modern scientific reasoning but through the introspection of one’s own experiences as a mature, serious, and virtuous person.

Some may find this proof unsatisfactory because it lacks the objective character that positivism claims for itself. Be that as it may, it should be evident after investigating Aristotle’s concepts of nature (physis), right by nature (physei dikaion), human intellect (nous), and practical wisdom (phronesis) that Aristotle had rejected an epistemological framework of sense-based, logically consistent propositions that Strauss advocated. The end result is that Aristotle’s physei dikaion is not the theory of natural rights that Strauss attributed to Greek philosophy. Aristotle’s appeal to the philosophical introspection of one’s own experiences as a mature person (spouadios) to verify whether one’s actions were physei dikaion is as different as can be when compared to Strauss’s account of Greek philosophy. Simply put, when compared to Brague, it appears that Strauss had misread Aristotle and, perhaps more broadly, misinterpreted Greek philosophy.

However, Brague’s account of Greek philosophy as one where the concept of divinity became separated from anthropomorphic gods to reside in physis is only partially correct. What Brague fails to account for is Aristotle’s prime mover as the other repository of divinity.26 That is, physis was the expression of divinity as an intelligible, rational structure, but this expression was incomplete because it longed for unity with a prime mover. Physis therefore had a dual telos: it sought to realize its own essence as well as unity with the prime mover. The neglect of the prime mover—and Aristotle more generally—in Brague’s work does not weaken his overarching argument, but it does not strengthen it either.

Notes

13. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1134b18–20.

14. It would seem unlikely that Strauss would make Aristotle a nihilist, given his remark that the philosopher needs to have a type of faith in his quest to know the whole of reality.

15. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1106a25–1107a26.

16. Ibid.,1103b31–1104a9, 1106a32.

17. Ibid., 1113a30–35; 1144b30–1145a1.

18. Ibid., 1140a24–1140b30; 1142a11–30; 1146b35–1146a7.

19. Ibid., 1177b27–1178a8.

20. Ibid., 1141b1–2; also see Aristotle, Metaphysics, 98b–984a.

21. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1003a–1005a, 1026a.

22. Ibid., 1072a20–1072b4; 984b15–20.

23. Aristotle, Physics, 198a20–198b10.

24. Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, 1248a25–7.

25. Ibid., 1248a25–7.

26. Cf. n. 12.

Originally published in The Political Science Reviewer.

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These two ideas of law and divinity are the two sources for divine law in Western civilization, as Leo Strauss noted: “This notion . . . the divine law, it seems to me is the common ground between the Bible and Greek philosophy. The common ground between the Bible and Greek philosophy is the problem of divine law. They solve that problem in a diametrically opposed manner” (LG, 24). Whereas the Greeks resorted to reason as articulated in philosophy for their understanding of the divine law, the religious were dependent upon the sacred texts of faith. This dual source of the divine law raises questions about preference, superiority, and the relationship between these two sources—the so-called “theologico-political problem” (or “theio-political,” as Brague prefers)—that covers not only the political but also the ethical and economic aspects of human behavior (the “theio-practical”) (LG, 7 & 256).

Confronted with the “theio-political” problem, each pre-modern civilization provided its unique solution. But it was modern Western civilization that challenged the assumptions of the divine law. The emergence of the will as the source of law, the model of the scientific laws of nature, and the changed relationship between commandment and counsel all accounted for a revolutionary understanding of the nature of law that dispensed with the divine (LG, 262). The law of modern society lacked the divine dimension and was presented as a path of emancipation from primitive sacrality. The result was one where the state was no longer bound by anything except its own will, what Stephen Toulmin has referred to as the hidden agenda of modernity (LG, 263).1

In this article, I revisit Brague’s account of the “theio-political” problem as encountered by both classical Greek and modern Western civilizations, with specific attention paid to the concept of nature. According to Brague, nature is a repository for both the divine and the law for the Greeks—a position that is contrary to Leo Strauss’s and, therefore, deserves closer examination. But, according to Brague, over time, this conception of nature became radically transformed with its elimination of the divine from law. What ac- counted for this change is only loosely sketched in Brague’s book and also requires further exploration. I hope to accomplish both of these tasks and hopefully shed more light on Brague’s and our own understandings of the divine law.

Nature, Nomos, and the Divine

According to Brague, there are three possible relationships among the divine, political power, and the law. The divine could either 1) affect political power directly and the law indirectly, as in Greece; affect the law directly and political power indirectly, as in revealed religions; or 3) affect neither, as found in the modern Western solution (LG, 15). In pre-philosophical classical Greece, the solution adopted was the first one, where the divine could be a model of behavior but was not “an efficient cause” of it (LG, 13). Although the divine legitimized political power in the form of kingship, it did not legislate human practice. The king was the source of the law, but the law itself was not divine (LG, 14–7, 20). The result was that legislative activity was not necessarily connected with the divine: it was separate and, therefore, could be independent of it.

This separation between law and divinity was an evolving process that began with Homer and was completed by Aristotle (LG, 20). Initially, the origin of all normative behavior was divine in origin, as evident when Homer spoke of Zeus conferring the king the scepter and judgment. Although this gift permitted the king to rule, it did not dictate a type of behavior. Solon and Demosthenes also viewed the polis as resembling a divine order and the law as an invention and gift from the gods, but, like Homer, did not conceive of the divine directly legislating human practice. Finally, the dramatists, particularly Sophocles in his Theban trilogy, wrote of the divine origins of law as visibly manifested to humans and permanent in nature.

But the clear separation between law and divinity emerged only after the dual process of the de-sacralization of knowledge into philosophy and of kingship into democracy (LG, 19). Human law (nomos) was freed of its divine origins and normative direction. However, nomos was still rooted in human mores and norms, and it was accompanied by the notion of justice (dike), a gift of divine origins from Zeus to humans, but which, like kingship, did not legislate human conduct (LG, 20). Democratic governance became possible with these two concepts of nomos and dike, for neither the content of the law nor the qualities of justice were dictated by the divine. Both nomos and dike permitted democratic citizens to govern themselves with “all the rules approved and enacted by the majority in an assembly whereby they declare what ought and what not ought to be done” (LG, 20).

Philosophers introduced the concept of nature (physis) and situated nomos in relation to it: the law was either in opposition to nature, and therefore pure convention, or in accord with it, and therefore expressed the natural law. For philosophers, this notion that divinity operated within this relationship made divinity no longer associated with the anthropomorphic gods but with an abstract understanding of nature. For example, Heraclitus spoke of the “need to distinguish between the gods and the source from which they hold their divinity, or, to put it differently, between the divine and what of the divine is crystallized in one concrete figure or another, such as the Olympian gods” (LG, 23).2 Separated from its gods, the idea of divinity became associated with nature and nature, in turn, became associated with law (LG, 23–4).

Humans could discern the law from what was most divine within them, i.e., their intellect (nous). As Plato wrote, “Of all studies, that of legal regulations provided they are rightly framed, will prove the most efficacious in making the learner a better man; for were it not so, it would be in vain that our divine and admirable law (nomos) bears a name akin to intellect (nous)” (LG, 24). Aristotle also concurred: “He therefore that recommends the law (nomos) shall govern seems to recommend that God and intellect (nous) alone shall govern, but he that would have man govern adds a wild animal also” (LG, 24). Through their nous, humans were able to uncover the origins of nomos.

Thus, the notion of divinity in Greece was associated with anthropomorphic gods, nature (physis), and human intellect (nous). As human law became conceptually separated from divinity, starting from Homer and ending in Aristotle, divinity also shifted from the gods to human intellect and to nature itself. But freed from its anthropomorphic origins, the law still remained rooted in a notion of the divine, with divinity re-conceptualized as nature. The Greek divine law consequently became the expression of a permanent structure of the natural order that was to be discovered by the human intellect (LG, 29).

Reason, Revelation, and Nature

Brague’s confluence of nature and divinity as the basis of nomos and nous runs contrary to a position held by Leo Strauss and, therefore, requires closer attention. Like Brague, Strauss argued that the Greeks used intellect (or what he preferred to call “reason”) to understand the world; but, unlike Brague, this cognitive faculty was not rooted in the divine.3 Strauss believed that reason was autonomous and completely independent of the divine, as opposed to someone like Aquinas, who wrote that “the very light of natural reason is a participation of the divine light” and “natural law is the participation of the eternal law in the rational creation.”4 Brague’s interpretation of the Greek philosophy follows in this tradition, whereas Strauss held a clearer separation between reason and revelation where wisdom could only come through “the unassisted human mind.”5

According to Strauss, natural reason—“the human mind which is not illumined by divine revelation”—proceeded from sensation, logical reasoning, and an awareness (noesis) that “is never divorced from sense perception and reasoning based on sense perception.”6 The objects of natural reason presumably were non-spiritual ones, the “experiences as can be had by all men at all times in broad daylight,” and eventually would be systematized in order to create a set of sense-based, logically consistent propositions about reality.7 This characterization of Greek philosophy, particularly of Plato and Aristotle, not only rejected the evidence of reason’s being divinely inspired as Brague has presented,  but it  made Greek philosophy a forerunner of positivism.8 In Strauss’s hands, Greek philosophy resembled Spinoza’s project “of modern science according to its original conception—to make the universe a completely clear and distinct, a completely mathematizable unit.”9

Strauss’s theory of natural right was rooted in a conception of nature that was objective (accessible by a reason based on sense perception) and independent of the divine. Such a theory dispensed with divinity for only natural things where its principles revealed which natural things were consistent with the whole of reality, thereby raising them to the level of ethics or “rights,” and which natural things were inconsistent with the whole of reality and therefore should be discarded. But in order to proceed on this quest, one must have faith to philosophize that the whole of reality is intelligible and rational and that it can reveal to us the right way of life.10 Like Kant, whose philosophical project ultimately relied upon a type of faith, Strauss likewise must start his inquiry with a belief that the whole of reality can be known by human reason.

Although Brague would agree with Strauss that the Greeks believed nature was intelligible and rationally structured, he would disagree with Strauss that nature was independent of the divine. For Brague, both nature (physis) and reason (nous) are consubstantial with the divine. Now that we know both thinkers’ positions, the question that confronts us is how to resolve this impasse. I propose to look at Aristotle’s account of nature, particularly his “right by nature” (physei dikaion), to see whether divinity is associated with nature and thereby reveal to us which thinker has a more accurate understanding of Greek philosophy.

The selection of Aristotle, as opposed to Plato, makes understanding the Greek conception of nature easier since Aristotle’s known writings are all treatises instead of dialogues: we can somewhat avoid the whole deciphering exercise that Strauss’s esoteric thesis would demand.11 The focus on Aristotle’s right by nature is also important because it had become the basis for Strauss’s and other thinkers’ theories of natural rights and consequently raises questions about the origins of such theories. But more importantly, Aristotle was the last of the great Greek philosophers where the separation between human law and divinity as expressed in anthropomorphic gods would be the greatest, according to Brague’s argument.12 If the concept of divinity did indeed shift from the gods to nature in the history of Greek thought, as Brague contends it did, then we should find the fullest manifestation of this shift in the last great Greek thinker, Aristotle.

Notes

1. The disappearance of the theio-political problem has caused some to view it as an accomplishment of modern Western civilization that needs to be protected by the continual elimination of religion from public life. The question confronting us today is whether humans can continue to exist without a reference to the divine: “Are we liberated or on the path to suicide?”

2. For more about the anthropomorphic gods and their relationships to humans and law, refer to Eric Voegelin, Order and History, Vol. II: The World of the Polis, ed. Athanasios Moulakis (Columbia, MO and London: University of Missouri Press, 2000).

3. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 87–8.

4. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I.12.11; I-II.91.2.

5. Leo Strauss, “What is Political Philosophy?” and Other Studies (New York: Free Press, 1959), 13; “The Mutual Influence of Theology and Philosophy,” Independent Journal of Philosophy 3 (1979), 115; Natural Right and History, 163.

6. Ibid., also Strauss, “Mutual Influence,” 122.

7. Strauss, “Mutual Influence,” 116–7.

8. For example, Aristotle wrote in Nicomachean Ethics (1103a, 1177b, 1178a) that the highest element of the soul was a site of both human reason and the divine. However, Strauss argued in Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1952) that classical philosophers employed esoteric devices in their writings to protect themselves from political pressures, especially when discussing truths that may have been unpopular, such as the non-existence of divinity. Since a great deal of literature already has been devoted to this subject, this article will not delve into the validity of Strauss’s esoteric thesis, which is made all the more difficult to ascertain   since Strauss himself did not make clear whether he was writing

9. Strauss, “Mutual Influence,” 116-7.

10. Ibid., 118.

11 Cf. n. 8.

12. Strangely, Brague pays more attention to Plato than Aristotle in his section. My focus on Aristotle should remedy this neglect.

Originally published in The Political Science Reviewer.

The post Nomos, Nature, and Modernity in Brague’s The Law of God (Part One) appeared first on The Miskatonian.

“There is a deepness in America,” the French existentialist Gabriel Marcel wrote in 1964, “something really that strives for the eternal.”¹ When hearing Marcel’s characterization of America, one invariably feels compelled to ask: Is what struck Marcel about the place still the case sixty years later? Or has it changed? Has a country that once so impressed Marcel for its spiritual depth lost its eye for great height, its wellspring run dry, having stagnated into cultural shallowness? In lieu of continuing to strive for the eternal, is the America of old gone, now instead striving for nothing?

Presumably, were such a question to fall to anyone, it is to the American scholar from whom one might look for a response. And yet, what better evinces the nature of the moment’s crisis than the fact that at a time in which it would be most fitting for the scholar to fulfill his vocation’s calling, where is he to meet the situation? Absent? Nowhere at all?

Often, it certainly can appear that way. Whoever or wherever he is, the scholar (the author makes no claim to being one himself) does not speak at the University. Nor does he speak on the television. Nor does he write in legacy print. How could it possibly be otherwise? Those today who deliver college commencement speeches, give interviews on television, and pen op-eds in the corporate media are those who have resolved to languish in a milieu comprised of institutions and brands that no longer live up to their lofty rhetoric and old reputation. Pseudo-leaders, pseudo-thinkers, and pseudo-writers who have settled for the pretense of truth rather than for the thing itself. They participate in a public discourse that pays lip service to truth only but does not serve it. Look upon the legion of imposters continually paraded before us as “experts.” That those held up in the public eye as intellectual voices are so laughably unworthy of being taken seriously is more than enough to make one wonder: for all the controversy concerning the rise of censorship and the suppression of free speech, were an American scholar actually given a forum to say whatever it is that he would wish to say, would anyone be interested in listening?

II

Further, consider the case of Marcel, which proves instructive. As someone known for having habituated himself to seeking out God’s signature in all things, we can be confident that he felt the presence of God at work among those whom he met on his visit to America. Even in the early 1960s, such a presence still involved more than what an appeal to Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” might imply. More than a theoretical posit or talking point, such presence involved the mood of a place that had a vital attunement to the ongoing activity of divine providence. This self-understanding that Marcel encountered explains the vibrancy he recognized in the American people and their land. He saw in them a place whose posture reflected confidence in God’s handiwork, that the nineteenth-century conception of “Manifest Destiny” was not some disingenuous rationalization intended to justify the subjugation and exploitation of whomever it perceived to be standing in its way but an acknowledgment, however otherwise flawed or naive, that America was a land of individual freedom, opportunity, and purpose, a nation justified in its belief that, even if the “American Dream” was difficult to attain, it was something genuinely worth striving for. Such assuredness was not blind hope. Nor was it baseless ideology, for it was rooted in the very landscape itself. Even today, God’s blessings are plainly manifest to those who have eyes to see. Look out on the Pacific from the shores of Carmel. View the open prairies of Montana. These are two places whose beauty stunned Marcel personally. That America was a place thought to be blessed by God is the impression that the landscape and the people understandably made on the Frenchman.

Is it unreasonable, then, to think a land as this should be capable of giving rise to thought? And not just any thought, but one uniquely its own?

III

In 1837, a century before Marcel visited America, the New England poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson examined the question in an address entitled “The American Scholar.” With an eye to measuring the state of America’s overall spirit, he turned his optimistic (yet critical) gaze upon the nation’s fledgling intellectual efforts. If it truly was the land of liberty, why then, asks Emerson, was the average American “timid, imitative, and tame,” while the attitude among its educated class remained “indolent, complaisant”?² Why had the American scholar, the resident of a “New World,” still not leapt from under the shadow of Old Europe? Why, wondered Emerson, did the American intellectual remain in thrall to the “courtly muses of Europe,”³ yoked to ideas unsuited to his native soil? Was there even an American scholar? Nearly two hundred years after Emerson first put this question to his Harvard audience, it remains an open one. What, indeed, is the state of the American scholar—is there one?

One could be forgiven for answering “no,” of course. To begin with, one might simply deny that it makes any sense to inquire into the current condition of the American scholar, given the fact that there is no agreed upon understanding of what precisely constitutes one. In any case, there are plenty of reasons for concluding that the American scholar is dead, according to any number of ways such a scholar might be defined.

If Emerson’s own personal vision of the scholar did eventually materialize concretely at some point in the nation’s history (in Thoreau perhaps), it proved to be an ephemeral manifestation, its figuration having long since evaporated after only briefly appearing. What would it mean to be an American scholar? At present, even asking the question is sure to elicit smug laughs, which further suggests that such scholars, wherever they are, are in short supply. Laboring beneath an influence so immense that we do not even notice its weight, everything that passes for intelligence and insight from the “expert” class—the television presenters, the celebrities, the professors, the governmental officials—encourages us to shrug our shoulders at the question, and to carry on with “research” and “studies,” to keep busy with what passes for scholarship, just so long as nobody asks what it would mean—could mean—to do so as an American.

“American scholar”—the expression may not be dismissed outright as a piece of nonsense on a par with the proverbial “round square.” Still, the adjective “American” is jarring enough to render the concept suspect, if not oxymoronic. The term “American scholar” is not contradictory. But it is vestigial, so the thought goes, an outmoded conception. As anyone who has learned to be cosmopolitan will object, the notion of an American scholar is antiquated. A false relic from a mythic past. For Emerson, the question was one brimming with possibility. But no longer for us. This is what those whom society deems wise—the academics, the activists, the think-tank psychiatrists, the intelligence officers—would have us believe.

IV

Is the question of the American Scholar passe? So it may seem. Returning to Marcel, what thus to make of his bold characterization of America? Was he deluded in his appraisal? Had the depth he thought that he had experienced only been an illusion? Or, had he, in fact, truly felt “something eternal”? The question merits deeper scrutiny. For if Marcel was not mistaken, perhaps a vestige of the light he saw at the time remains burning. And no matter how faint it may be, even the tiniest ember is still something.

“Free should the scholar be—free and brave,” says Emerson.⁴ When today it is no longer clear what a scholar simpliciter would be, asking what specifically it would mean to be an American one can serve as a point of entry to that more general question.

Many of the attributes said to describe the scholar, after all, are commonly associated with American virtues. Independence, for one, is commonly observed to be the lifeblood of the American character. The concept of independence has a political valence. But independence here—independence of mind, that is—is an intellectual virtue. Truth awaits its perpetual renewal in us and finds its consummation only in one who refuses to rest content with merely reading what others have written or by repeating what others have said. The one who learns the truth and who comes to understanding is the individual who “thinks for himself”—in short, as Emerson puts it, the one who conforms himself to the universal in the singular to become “Man Thinking.”

Bemoaning the “sluggard instinct of the American continent”⁵ in his Harvard lecture, the remedy for ignorance, slavishness, and fear, says Emerson, is always near to hand: namely, in nature, in books, and in action. “First in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind,”⁶ it is nature, he claims, that teaches us the same perennial lesson that had struck Tertullian as well when the latter observed the seasons and the rotation between day and night: “There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning to itself.”⁷ Man is cosmic, a miniature creation within creation, a small whole contained within the larger one. As Emerson says, just as “the drop is a small ocean,” so “a man is related to also nature.”⁸ Not only is the individual the world’s fractal, but both form a bond. For if, he says, “in oneself is the law of all nature,” then “its beauty is the beauty of one’s own mind.”⁹ To know thyself and to observe nature—the two are selfsame.

Seeking wisdom is to align oneself with nature itself. About that, Aristotle was correct: “All men by nature desire to know.” But with books, it can go either way. Being unread is nothing to brag about if that means boasting in one’s ignorance. Yet there is an equal danger in the opposite extreme. Beware of becoming the bookworm who forgets to live! (Whether Aristotle is also correct about virtue always consisting in a “Golden Mean” between two vices is debatable; that hitting the mark, in this case, entails avoiding both excessive learning and willful ignorance seems true). Emerson, for his own part, tells us that books used properly “are for nothing but to inspire.”¹⁰

Contrary, however, to Aristotle, who held contemplation to be our highest calling, it is action, says Emerson, that is our final end: “Thinking is the function. Living is the functionary.”¹¹ Action is a movement, yet it does not require great changes of place. To act, says Emerson, is to dwell in what lies nearest. Journeys to distant lands, nostalgia for Eden, fantasies of a future Atlantis—all these dissipate us by squandering our strength. Wisdom consists in being content with where we are and what is before us. (Anecdotally, this seems true. The Parisian philosopher Jean-Louis Chrétien, one of the best philosophers in generations and someone who was also very holy, left France only once in his entire life. That is not to say travel is a sin. But neither should it be seen as a spiritual panacea). As Emerson writes, “I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low.”¹² Nor is there any reason to place our aspirations in another. The scholar’s life, whatever else it entails, leaves no room for participating in a cult of personality. Great concern over fleeting matters of public controversy, political tumult—such preoccupations alienate us from what matters by deceiving us into thinking that we should trust in those we see on the television or view on the Internet more than we do ourselves as if somehow there were more to be accomplished in belonging to a virtual collective than what already is available within the halls of our heart.

One needn’t be an Emerson or Thoreau to see that the small things of creation all around us can be our teachers. If we only listen and look, the murmuring brook and the swaying willows have far more to teach us about being human than anything the news has to say. Watching the bumblebee flying about her business at the rose flower helps us organize our own by sharpening our perception of what tasks are worthy of our time and rejecting those that are not. Observing the flower petals shimmer in the sunlight as they float gently through the breeze, carrying them down to earth, cleanses our inner cup, leaving us with that peace only purity knows. Nature’s splendor (even its silence) communicates more profoundly to us than the chatter and the strife of human tongues. It is better to spend an afternoon on a walk outside than staring at a screen. And when we on occasion do stop to take an interest in the common conversation (the newest story, that latest fad, that huge scandal, that current event), we must be careful not to entrust ourselves to a spectacle that will divert us from the road to Zion. Emerson himself was not a traditional Christian, but he nevertheless comes close to putting his finger on distraction’s spiritual danger when he writes, “Some great decorum, some fetish of a government, some ephemeral trade, or war, or man is cried up by half mankind and cried down by the other half as if all depended on this particular up and down.”¹³ The spectacle (and idle talk) depersonalizes. It obscures the noble. Effaces the sacred. Demeans the dignity of everyone by falsely suggesting that our attention’s calling resides in anything besides what we are each able to accomplish through being alone before God.

Is this to propose individualism? Yes. But not atomization. And certainly not narcissism. The individual’s preeminence, so understood, is not a matter of selfishness or egoism. It implies no disregard for others. Far from it! In point of fact, only by accepting the individual’s supremacy in light of our human equality (as Emerson would say, “it is one soul which animates all men”¹⁴) is genuine community achievable. If a worthwhile cooperative undertaking is to come to fruition, its flourishing demands that the inviolable sanctity of the individual not be transgressed. As Emerson puts it, “Every thing that tends to insulate the individual—to surround him with barriers of natural respect, so that each man shall feel the world is his, and man shall treat with man as a sovereign state with a sovereign state—tends to the true union as well as greatness.”¹⁵ Nonconformism, self-reliance, originality—here again is that spirit of American independence. Staunch individualism, but not lawlessness. An individualism that is free from the vicissitudes and pressures of the crowd, and hence one that enacts freedom—true independence that is subject to the law of nature and so God.

(Here is a parenthetical, but not a simple aside. At the present moment, the exercise of such individual agency is the essential form of resistance to a transhumanist future, a dystopia in which each of us would live under a medical and surveillance corporate tyranny whereby all of human life will no longer be worth living, for it will have ceased to be human. Charles Spurgeon, despite otherwise falling into grave theological error due to his Calvinism, once quite perceptively asked the rhetorical question of why anyone who loves the truth would expect honor from a world that had crucified the Lord. His point was that one should not. In a world that literally murdered the Truth, one should expect to be vilified for loving the truth. This is why, with experience, one is no longer surprised to discover that what the world accepts and defends as an obvious, unquestionable truth turns out to be a lie. Jesus Christ, Lord of Truth, the “Conspiracy Theorist” par excellence, for it, is he who tells us with authority that the world indeed is evil and that those in power are themselves liars, like their father, the “father of lies.”)

V

Emerson’s views on the American scholar are illuminating. At the same time, relying too heavily on his thoughts runs the risk of succumbing to the mimicry he himself rightly cautions us against. As a useful point of contrast, consider instead F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose contribution to American letters unequivocally challenges the legacy of Emersonian optimism. During the period between the First War and the looming Great Depression, Fitzgerald’s early novels describe how the American pursuit of happiness was shattered. In Fitzgerald’s estimation, the American Dream had been exposed as just that—a dream, a fantasy. After all the carnage in Europe, followed by the empty decadence at home and soon-to-be poverty, the hope of ever retrieving the nation’s former innocence was gone. What remains is nostalgia for a time when the future had once seemed bright.

In his 1920 debut novel This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald tells the story of Princeton student Amory Blaine. It is a story of paradise lost—of losing one’s initial youthful optimism. Blaine’s quest to find himself becomes a series of failed romances that steadily embitters him. Here, it is worth recalling that the novel as a literary genre has its origins in a distinctively modern mode of self-consciousness. And Fitzgerald’s Blaine typifies it. Amory’s behavior exemplifies the growing narcissism and hedonism bred by twentieth-century commercialized and industrialized America. In steady succession, Beatrice, Isabelle, Clara, Rosalind, and Eleanor turn out to be instruments for Blaine’s own misguided attempt to achieve wholeness, either through her accepting some image of himself that is merely an image or else by his possessing an idealized projection of her. The whole game is an exercise in idolatry, even if Fitzgerald, the atheist, does not see it that way himself. Amory seeks what he imagines will be happiness in a fantasy—or, more exactly, the pursuit of happiness itself is the fantasy. What is Fitzgerald’s lesson for the reader? In short, when reality inevitably intrudes to pop our little bubble of illusion, tragedy is the only logical outcome. Blaine’s personal initiation into disillusionment is not meant to be idiosyncratic. Fitzergarld thinks he has captured something universal. At the novel’s end, by which point Blaine finds himself homeless, destitute, and disillusioned, he remarks to himself ironically, “I know thyself, but that is all—.”¹⁶ In Fitzgerald’s telling, Amory’s journey of self-discovery, from “romantic egotist” to “educated personage,” ends in existential lament. If Fitzgerald is to be believed, disillusionment is not a pathology. It is lucidity.

The most exemplary illustration of Fitzgerald’s use of eros as a governing figure for the American Dream is found in The Great Gatsby’s account of Jay Gatsby’s pursuit of Daisy Buchanan. Climbing the social ladder, for Gatsby, is simply a necessary means in order to satisfy the requisite social status for becoming a viable suitor for her. Like Amory Blaine, Gatsby is driven by romantic yearning. But the resulting self-transformation brought about in the course of trying to win Daisy’s affection only leaves him empty, and when he abruptly dies so close to attaining his desire of possessing her, the entire quest is shown to have always been so ephemeral, and so flitting, even if nobody, least of all Gatsby himself, wanted to admit it. Daisy moves on with Tom, and that is the end of it. The story’s narrator, Nick Carraway, recounts with astonishment how hardly anybody seems to miss Gatsby when he is gone. It is as if the man had never existed. This fundamental solitude of the human condition is something that Gatsby’s own father fails to appreciate even after witnessing the aftermath of his son’s murder. In denial over the fact that Gatsby’s death has shown the Roaring 20’s notion of the American Dream to be illusory, the bereaved father chooses to cling to the very same delusion that had animated his son’s life. To Carraway, he says of his son, “Jimmy was bound to get ahead.”¹⁷ Fitzgerald, of course, intends for us to disagree. Beneath the glamorous veneer of Gatsby’s materialistic lifestyle had been a hidden life of pain and desperation.

Gatsby’s discontent is not merely the consequence of a rift originating from some untraversable gap lying between his desires and a social world incapable of satisfying them. There is a fracture in his consciousness, a split in his psyche, inasmuch as he is haunted by the specter of another, an idealized image of what he desires to be but cannot, a self-image that is sure to lead him nowhere if he pursues the path it takes him down—what makes Gatsby tragic, for Fitzgerald, is that there is no destination for his journey of self-discovery. For everything about the world of West and East Eggs Gatsby inhabited, including above all the people is appearance. If, in just a hundred years, the American consciousness could shift so drastically from Emerson’s hope to Fitzgerald’s pessimism, it is because materialistic modern America forces those trying to “make it” to live a lie. City life is prone to produce deflated husks, empty shells, ghosts who float disconnected from their surroundings, struggling to find fulfillment and satisfaction in a form of social recognition in which such approval is, in fact impossible.

Although one might take Fitzgerald’s work as a deconstruction of the myth of individualism, that would be too hasty. The problem is not with individualism per se but with a pernicious species of it that seeks attainment in carnal things outside oneself. To return to Marcel, is it happenstance that when the French philosopher recounts that which in America evokes the eternal, he does not mention the concrete sprawl of Los Angeles or the steel skyscrapers of Chicago? It is America’s natural beauty, the oceans and the mountains, the prairies and the deserts, through which God spoke to him. A healthy, robust American individualism finds its freedom in what God alone bestows, not the spoils of social climbing.

The futility of seeking affirmation from others in a society fundamentally unequipped for providing it is the theme of Ralph Ellison’s existentialist classic, Invisible Man. The narrator is socially invisible because he is black, and thus a second-class citizen in his own country, somebody marginalized and ignored by his white neighbors. Nobody properly recognizes his individual human dignity. Ellison’s novel, however, is not another banal critique of racial injustice in America, for it is more deeply an analysis of how the scourge of social alienation afflicts everyone. The obvious, repulsive hypocrisy at the time of America’s lip-service to “justice for all” serves to highlight the underlying deceit at work in all human society. The callous and self-absorbed people who use Gatsby, for instance, when he is alive but then fail to pay him a single thought after he is dead, are as unwilling to recognize the inner dignity of their fellow whites as they are black men. The problem is not that the others whom Ellison’s protagonist encounters are racist. The problem is that they are inhuman, manifesting in their prejudice.

Truth resides in the inner man, which explains what makes it so damaging for a society to ignore and violate it. Ellison, like Fitzgerald, reminds us that in a narcissistic culture whose regime is one of selfish desire, everyone sees only himself—everybody, without exception, is an invisible nobody. In the novel’s first lines, the narrator states, “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”¹⁸ Never understood by others, he is diminished in the eyes of the shallow gazes failing to see him. Toward the conclusion, he says, “When I discover who I am, I’ll be free”¹⁹—here, Ellison’s Invisible Man voices an aspiration that just as well could have been uttered by Gatsby as he stared under the moon across the lake to the green light on Daisy’s dock. Black or white, rich or poor, man or woman, existence is a struggle.

VI

Emerson’s optimistic transcendentalism, Fitzgerald’s paradoxically pessimistic idealism, and Ellison’s resolute individualistic existentialism—their differences notwithstanding- are characteristic expressions of the American soul. They are exercises in what the American poet Walt Whitman termed “American personalism.” Though it is a school too rich and diverse to be defined simplistically, personalism as a philosophy holds that it is the person who is the ultimate value and reality. The American spirit, thus, is the personalist spirit, for it maintains that everyone has equal dignity and absolute value. It does not, with an evil eye, skim along the surface of things but penetrates down to their depths. And just as the German theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar noted that “Without the biblical background personalism is inconceivable,”²⁰ so too for America’s deepness. Individualism does not require a denial of tradition. Far from downplaying or denying the vital influences that have shaped it, whether it be the legacy of religious tolerance and civil liberty we take from Bayle and Locke or the separation of powers from Montesquieu, such Americanism embraces that heritage as proof of man’s universal dignity. Americanism, then, is simply the affirmation that the only true humanism is the one acknowledging the sacredness of each individual human being bearing the image of God.

If, then, philosophical personalism in all its varieties exalts the everyman, American personalism does so precisely because it knows every man has been called to glory in Jesus Christ. America is the “New World” that allowed for a geographical, political, economic, social, intellectual, and spiritual space in which it finally became clear that the entire world itself is passing away, each of our lives being temporary flickers able humbly to contribute (or not) to God’s eternal order. Accordingly, when people today condemn figures from America’s past for their alleged wrongs and failings, it must be emphasized that the ideals of America itself remain worthy of our esteem, even if the individuals and institutions responsible for living up to them are failing now more than ever before. Human hypocrisy and wickedness are no reasons to dispense with the Christian spirit by which the past conduct of others is judged to be bad. Pressing the nation further headlong into a condition that inverts the Christian ethos will only lead to darkness far exceeding what this revolutionary spirit claims to oppose (“Racism,” “Fascism,” “Disinformation,” etc.). Those who know this and continue to do all they can to bring it about, nevertheless, are not political revolutionaries seeking social justice or equity. Come to kill, steal, and destroy, they are of the spirit of the antichrist.

To conclude where we began, what then is the American scholar? Is there any such thing? In another essay entitled “Self-reliance,” dedicated to examining that most American of virtues, Emerson writes, “We are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.”²¹ Emerson here invokes the power of the eternal that so impressed Marcel. Naturally, when one speaks in reverence of the eternal of which Marcel himself spoke, there is bound to follow handwringing and scoffing from those who have their minds set on lower things. But so what? Say whatever else one will of it now, America was said to be a “City upon a Hill.” No place in this world is utopia, so, as ever, America must remain a waystation for those who await New Jerusalem. May the work of its scholars shine a bit of light during that vigil.

Notes

1 Gabriel Marcel, “Some Reflections on Existentialism,” Philosophy Today 8, no. 4 (1964): 248.

2 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in The Essential Writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Mary Oliver (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 59.

3 Emerson, “The American Scholar,” 59.

4 Emerson, 54.

5 Emerson, 43.

6 Emerson, 44.

7 Emerson, 45.

8 Emerson, 58.

9 Emerson, 59.

10 Emerson, 47.

11 Emerson, 51.

12 Emerson, 57.

13 Emerson, 54.

14 Emerson, 56.

15 Emerson, 58.

16 F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920), 285.

17 F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 138.

18 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Modern Library, 1994), 15.

19 Ellison, Invisible Man, 225.

20 Hans Urs von Balthasar, “On the Concept of Person,” in Communio: International Catholic Review 13 (1986): 18–26.

21 Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Mary Oliver (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 133.

Bibliography

Balthasar, Hans Urs von. “On the Concept of Person.” Translated by Peter Verhalen. Communio: International Catholic Review 13 (1986): 18–26.

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Modern Library, 1994.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The American Scholar.” In The Essential Writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 43-59. Edited by Mary Oliver. New York: Modern Library, 2000.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Self-Reliance.” In The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 132-153. Edited by Mary Oliver. New York: Modern Library, 2000.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. This Side of Paradise. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920.

Marcel, Gabriel. “Some Reflections on Existentialism.” Philosophy Today 8, no. 4 (1964): 248-257.

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I say this attention is disproportionate, however, because it causes us to lose sight of the smaller forms of association that play a much larger role in our real lived experience. We go to schools, we work at jobs, and we come home to families where we hope to find some measure of belonging. The degree of impact that my place of work has upon me as an individual is thousands of times larger than the impact that Society has upon me as an abstract totality. Indeed, we can state this as a general law: A community’s influence over an individual tends to be inversely proportional to its level of abstraction. The more removed by its generality from the concrete realities of a person’s life, the more weak and inchoate the influence will be. Thus, the social dynamics of my parish exercise a greater influence upon my spiritual life than the social dynamics of contemporary Catholicism, which in turn exercise a greater influence than those of Christianity as a whole. Thankfully, I remain mostly unaware of just what goes on in the far-flung reaches of that abstraction.

I propose, therefore, that theorists would better spend their time if they turned their attention away from the highest levels of abstraction and focused their powers of analysis instead upon smaller, more concrete forms of association. Russell Kirk called these smaller forms of association “mediating institutions,” and his point was to emphasize the way that these institutions come between the top-level political power of the nation-state and the individual citizen.¹. I want to borrow this term but apply it in a broader way than political mediation alone. These communities not only come between the individual and the state; they come between the individual and capital-S Society, and it is only through them that the individual has any contact with the higher levels of abstraction. The kinds of community I have in mind accomplish this mediation in at least two distinct ways.

First, mediating institutions are epistemic mediators. That is, they provide a host of filtration and interpretation mechanisms to the individual. The individual only knows about and knows how to interpret the broader, more abstract layers of society through his life within smaller communities. Without them, the naked individual simply has no tools whereby he can make sense of what is going on in the country as a whole, let alone the totality of our geopolitical situation or the entire sweep of history. To describe this function, I will steal another term, this time from John Verveke, and call these smaller associations “sense-making communities.”

How would I even know about, let alone make sense of, the failure of Silicon Valley Bank or its effects without a concrete reporting institution such as the Wall Street Journal or concrete contact with friends at work who are themselves informed by other concrete institutions? The Wall Street Journal has an office, a staff with individual names, and a recognizable company ethos. The Economy as an abstract whole does not. After informing me about the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, the Wall Street Journal and my circle of friends at the office also provided me with the epistemic framework to make sense of what had happened. We never hear raw data. Events are presented along with an interpretation and evaluation of those events. Only by living within networked communities that constantly present us with information and simultaneously provide us with an apparatus for interpreting that information can we, as individuals, form any opinions at all.

Second, mediating institutions are ethical mediators. That is the communities in which we live shape and form the way we live by providing the basic contours of the kind of life that is possible and the attitudes we can expect from our neighbors in response to the way we choose to live. Ethics, properly speaking, only happens within a concrete community because only a concrete community can have an ethos, that is, a communally established way of living and acting. The individual can only have an ethos in a secondary sense by the way he reacts to and chooses to live within the ethos of the various communities of which he is a part. By doing so, the individual does his small part to shape the ongoing, organic development of the community. The relationship here is reciprocal and additive. The community ethos provides the basic environment and foundation for an individual’s way of living, and the individual’s way of living contributes along with his neighbors to establish the ethos of the community as it develops.

As Aristotle observed, man is a political animal. In the limited cases of feral children (none of which have been truly and completely separated from the human community), we see the devastating effects that isolation has upon the individual. Such children fail to develop even the basic capacities characteristic of a proper human existence and often die before maturity. An individual person learns how to be a person by participating in the life of communities alongside other persons. Again, man is not a political animal by participating directly in a capital-P, capital-S Political Society. He is a political animal by participating in the life of St. Louis, the life of his military regiment, or the life of his model train club. All of these overlapping communities embody a particular set of habitual judgments, habitual forms of speech, habitual ways of awarding prestige, and habitual ways of sanctioning misbehavior.

As both an epistemic and an ethical mediator, one particular form of concrete community rises above the rest as enormously more important than all the others. Man is a political animal, but he is first of all a familial animal. Even when the family is absent in a person’s upbringing, this very absence is one of the most significant facts of his life. Even when a son rejects everything that his father stands for and makes his way alone in the world, this very rejection is a response to the fundamental role his father has played and must be among the chief elements in a faithful biography. More normally, the family functions as the mediating institution par excellence in a person’s upbringing.

Through life in the family, a child first hears about many things and also learns what attitudes toward those things are appropriate. A child learns by sitting beside his father’s recliner that the Steelers are to be loved and the Bengals to be hated. He can run through the starting lineup of the Steelers by name, and he can quote detailed statistics about their performance. More generally, he learns that watching sports in a recliner is simply what one does on a Sunday afternoon and that football is something that all normal men and a few women are enthusiastic about. In another family, a daughter grows up entirely ignorant about football, supposing that the World Series is the highest achievement in that sport, but knows much about the finer points of film and cinematography. She can name several films from the sixties featuring Cary Grant or Audrey Hepburn, and at a young age, she makes sophisticated judgments about their acting. Still another family teaches its children how to quote verbatim all the political slogans of their favored radio outrage mongers. The three sons all know the names of many congressmen, political pundits, and news outlets. More importantly, they know exactly which tone of voice to use when speaking about each.

In the family, the child learns how to respond to a huge range of values both through explicit instruction and, more frequently, through implicit examples. The family goes to church on Sunday morning, and the child learns thereby what kind of response is due to the sacred. He listens to the explicit words of his mother’s instruction and the homily of the priest, but more impactfully, he watches closely and internalizes the deportment of his mother and older brother, who organize the local worship. The weekly repetition of saccharine smiles and dopey guitar accompanied by recorder and bongos does more to his soul than the catechism. It is here that he learns not merely simple, individual actions or bits of information but the entire shape of a way of life, a whole posture and way of moving that includes both body and soul. This develops organically by imitation, admiration, mockery, or by showing off.

The family sets the boundaries for the kinds of behaviors that are acceptable and unacceptable and enforces those boundaries through a variety of sanctions and rewards. A daughter in one family learns that tearing the pages in a book is tantamount to murder because books are something precious. A son in another learns that he can get away with little lies because they are glossed over and generally accepted. Frequently, the sanctions on behavior are explicit punishments, but they also involve simply awarding or withholding approval in more or less overt ways. Sometimes, the background dynamics of a family unintentionally incentivize certain behaviors just by making them easier than the alternatives. For example, a family that is in the habit of leaving the television running in the background may find that they are also in the habit of letting unfinished conversations easily drop or fade away without ever intending to train this conversational habit.

More difficult to notice because it is so frequently taken for granted in the background, the family also establishes the very horizon of possibility for what kinds of life can be undertaken by the child. While it may be normal in one family for a child to think of becoming an artist, this would not even occur to the child of another family because it has no place within their horizon of possibility. No one they know is an artist. They would not know how to begin becoming an artist. They have no reference point for how an artist might make money and so advance beyond being a mere hobbyist. If asked, they would, of course, know that such a thing is possible and that other people do, in fact, become artists, but it does not enter into the range of concrete options that they consider for their own lives.

What I have said about families can be extended in analogous and less potent ways to many other concrete forms of mediating institutions. People are enculturated epistemically and ethically in their apartment buildings, at the farmers market, at the library story hour where they bring their children, by the YouTube channels to which they subscribe, or at the local bar. The family, however, is almost always the most impactful mediating institution in a person’s life by a large margin. The family, therefore, should occupy far more philosophical attention than it does and it should form the paradigm for understanding the ways that small communities shape us as individuals.

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Aristotle says that the politeia as a thing not only refers to the ruling part or body (the politeuma) that actually held ruler or control over the given political community but also the very way of life and overall political culture that shapes that given political community. The polis—which was the form of the political community at the time of the Ancient Greeks—was understood to be an aggregation of the various households (oikoi) who shared the same space or territory and in doing so generally shared a common life together as a single community. Thus given the household (oikos) itself was an aggregation of different relationships that are found living within it (i.e., the husband-wife, parent-child, sibling-sibling, and master-slave/servant relationships). The nature of the polis needs to be understood as an aggregation of discrete parts whose only real unity arises out of their common shared life together in that shared space. And the political is the inter-arrangement, structure, or order of which part of the polis rules (that is to say has authority and control) over the whole community and thus to rule for the benefit of the whole community and not merely themselves or their friends and family.

Aristotle at first suggests that the politeia could be understood to be defined by two characteristics—(1) the number of rulers and (2) the justice of the ruler’s rule. As to the characteristic of the number of rulers (1), he presents us with a very common-sense division between the one, the few, or the many. As to the characteristic of the justice of the ruler’s rule (2), it is divided between the rulers ruling for the benefit or utility or good of themselves or for the sake of the whole community. Here Aristotle does not insist as Plato had that justice would require that rulers rule only for the sake of the ruled, but that that they ought to rule for the sake and benefit of the whole community and not some particular part. And if the rulers ruled for their own interest at the sake of the others in the community such rule would resemble in character despotic rule or mastery—which is understood to be rule over slaves/servants where the rule is for the sake of the rulers and not the ruled.

Out of the juxtaposition of these two categories, Aristotle presents the first typology of politeias:

What is interesting in this first typology of politeia is the name given for the politeia of the rule of the many for the common advantage is the same word for the thing he is trying to classify—politeia.  Thus, Aristotle uses the same word to signify one particular type or variety that he uses to label the whole class of things he is trying to describe.  It would be like if he had given a list of species or one of the specie was called specie. 

Aristotle in doing this had many commentators and translators perplexed about what to do with this politeia called politeia.  And using politeia to refer to a specific variety of politeia was rather unique to Aristotle, as neither Thucydides, Hesiod, Xenophon, or Plato did this.  Plato speaks of the timocracy, the rule of the warriors or honor lovers—Aristotle is wholly about such a regime in his Politics.  And because of this most translators and commentators opt to call this particular form of politeia a polity or something like a constitutional rule or a republic (but that would be problematic as the Latin for politeia is res publica).

            Yet right after Aristotle presented this six-fold typology in his Politics, he immediately challenges the validity of this just presented typology by making the claim that what truly defines the nature of an oligarchy is not the fact that its rulers are few but that they are the rich, the wealthy.  He argues that even if the ruling rich or wealthy were many (and the largest and most numerous part—even the majority) and not few its rule would remain oligarchic rather than democratic.   And this is as true about the rule of the poor or the vulgar (the demos)—that if the few poor or vulgar ruled over a political community its rule would be democratic in character.   Thus, the number of rulers seems to be accidental to the character of the given politeia.  What is more important and more critical is what exactly is the group that is ruling—who are they? Are they the wealthy/rich or the poor?  Aristotle suggests that what defines and distinguishes one politeia from another is the claim made by each group on who should rule and why. Thus, each politeia advances a specific claim about the justice and justification of its rule over the political community.  

            At Politics 3.10 Aristotle allows each form of politeia to put forward their individual claim (or justification) to rule.  In this particular presentation, Aristotle only does not let two of the six types of politeia present their claim as the other four are allowed to—one is tyranny and the other the politeia called politeia.   Whereas the claim of tyranny is obvious—might makes right—the claim of the politeia named politeia is not.  And given the very strangeness in its very name—one would expect some clarification would be given—but in Book 3 of the Politics, none is given.  So, at the end we have five claims—four explicitly presented in the text, one only implied and they are the following:

In Politics the claim of justice makes by each politeia seems to be what truly defines it.  Yet where we turn to Politics we not only return to the original six-fold typology of politeia of Politics but we once again see Aristotle drop it with the claim that a politeia with a much more complex one that not only has politeia varying across types but there is also variation within each type as well.  Thus, Aristotle suggests that there is a high degree of variation within a specific form of politeia than there is variance among them. 

            Yet what is shocking in Aristotle’s treatment of politeia in Book 4 is that he focuses more clearly on the politieas of democracy and oligarchy.  He says he has already discussed kingship and aristocracy already and argues that what remains is to discuss what has yet to be discussed from the original six forms of politeia—oligarchy, democracy, politeia called politeia, and tyranny, but what happens is somewhat different than promised. Instead, he spends the first three chapters going once again over what the politeia is and what is it composed of, and then he fleshes out the various parts of multitudes (the many) and notables (the few) that exist within and forms most political communities only then and there to give an account of the variations within the democratic politeia.

            After the account of the variations of the democratic politeia, the next chapter he then presents the variations of the oligarchic politeia.  One would expect for him to now turn to the next politeia—either tyranny or the politeia called politeia—but he does not, rather he represented both the account of the variations of democratic politeias and then oligarchic politeias.  Only after this representation of the variations of democratic (which slightly differs from the earlier account) and oligarchic politeias he then gives a blurred account of both aristocracy (which he said he had already discussed) and the politeia called politeia—which unlike the account of the varieties of democratic and oligarchic politeias does not offer clear cut variations for each he seems to all too often blur them both with either oligarchy or democracy.  These two chapters are some of the most confusing and difficult to read and understand in Aristotle’s Politics and remain an endless source of controversy over what exactly he is trying to argue here remains with us till today.

            It is in this more complex form of the politeia that we just mentioned above that Aristotle clearly distinguishes his teaching from that of Plato and Xenophon, as well as Thucydides and Herodotus. In fact, later writers like Plutarch and Polybius—Greeks who are writing and living at the time after Rome has conquered Greece and ruled over it—speak of the politeia as more akin to Plato than to Aristotle, especially Aristotle’s account of Politics book 4, 5, and 6.  The fact that so little is mentioned of Aristotle’s account about politeia among the Roman and early Christian authors it is commonly believed that these authors either did not bother to read or even have access to Aristotle’s Politics.

            Aristotle’s account of the politeia also fundamentally differs from that of Plato’s and Polybius’s accounts by his underscoring that change of politeia will occur between politeia but also within variations as well.  Both Plato and Polybius have a narrow understanding of politeia and thus present change or politeia as of a cyclical path.  In fact, their use of this cyclical change from one form of politeia to the next, in a particular path from kingship to aristocracy, to timocracy (which for Plato is the rule by the warriors), to oligarchy, to democracy, to tyranny.  This circular motion of the cycle of politeia change is one of the reasons such change of a politeia would be called a revolution.  Hence the power of this cyclical vision of political change.  But Aristotle’s account of this change of one type of politeia was radically at odds with his teacher Plato.  Aristotle held that that change could not only occur from one type to another as well as within type from one variation to other but also that there was no one clear set pattern or cycle that political change of politeia would take.  Aristotle would argue that yes some changes were more likely and others less likely but others changes were possible.  He also argues that the cycle did not necessarily repeat in the way Plato presented it.

When we look at what Aristotle shows us about the way political change can emerge and occur from one form of politeia to another, either a change within or among types, we see that he offers a model of political change that is not only as dynamic as many contemporary models of political systems/regimes, but we also find in today’s social scientific study of politics, what we call political science.  Yet Aristotle’s treatment of politeia differs from most if not all contemporary models found in today’s political science because his approach allows both strong quantitative and qualitative characteristics (not requiring the sacrificing of one for the other that is common in most contemporary approaches) that also are highly empirical in character yet offering great prescriptive richness that much empirical political typically lacks.

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