The Greek polis and the Roman civitas represent some of the most distinctive forms of political and social organization in history. Yet, they are often misunderstood when examined through the lens of the modern state. Modern conceptions of the state—centralized, bureaucratic, and sovereign—emerged from the intellectual revolutions of the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Thinkers like Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke reimagined political organization as a rational system of governance designed to maintain order, safeguard rights, and administer territories. This shift marked the state as an abstract and impersonal authority distinct from ancient communities’ organic, participatory systems. Labeling the polis or civitas as early forms of the state distorts their essence and overlooks their fundamental differences.

The modern state is defined by its sovereignty, territoriality, and institutionalization. It operates through impersonal legal frameworks and hierarchies, ensuring governance through the centralized exercise of power. In contrast, the polis was a holistic community where governance was deeply integrated with social customs, religious practices, and communal identity. Participation in the polis was not merely a right but a defining aspect of life, as citizens actively engaged in decision-making and the administration of justice. Similarly, the Roman civitas was built on shared norms, mutual obligations, and a sense of collective responsibility rather than modern states’ hierarchical structures and territorial sovereignty. These differences highlight the need to study these ancient communities on their own terms rather than forcing them into a framework they were never intended to fit.

Understanding the polis and civitas requires a departure from linear narratives of political development that portray them as precursors to the modern state. The participatory ethos and communal integration of these ancient societies starkly contrast with the alienation and abstraction of contemporary political systems. Ancient thinkers like Aristotle and Plato articulated a vision of political life rooted in virtue, justice, and the pursuit of the good life, emphasizing the collective flourishing of the community over the efficiency or control often prioritized by modern states. This perspective offers valuable insights into alternative governance models and challenges modern assumptions about the nature of political organization.

By exploring the unique features of the polis and civitas, this essay seeks to illuminate their distinctiveness and the lessons they hold for contemporary political thought. Far from being primitive or incomplete states, these ancient communities were sophisticated systems that integrated governance, ethics, and culture in ways modern states have often failed to achieve. Recognizing their differences from modern states allows us to appreciate the diversity of human political experience. It opens the door to reimagining governance in ways that prioritize community, participation, and shared responsibility.

The Emergence of the Modern State and Its Philosophical Underpinnings

The modern state emerged as a distinct political construct during the intellectual transformations of the Renaissance and Enlightenment. These periods, marked by a renewed emphasis on reason, individualism, and universal principles, redefined political organization as abstract and systematic. Thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke were pivotal in conceptualizing the state through the social contract framework. Hobbes, in Leviathan, argued for the necessity of a centralized authority to escape the brutish chaos of the state of nature. On the other hand, Locke saw the state as a mechanism to safeguard natural rights like life, liberty, and property. Both thinkers envisioned a political entity defined by sovereignty, bureaucracy, and legal-rational governance, a far cry from the communal and participatory ethos of the ancient polis and civitas.

This vision of the state was not just a theoretical construct but a reflection of broader social changes. The rise of centralized monarchies, the decline of feudalism, and the spread of capitalist economies necessitated new forms of political organization. The modern state became an entity capable of exercising impersonal authority over a defined territory, separate from the cultural or personal ties that characterized earlier forms of governance. It marked a shift towards abstraction, where institutions became the locus of power rather than individuals or communities. This framework profoundly contrasts with the polis and civitas, where governance was deeply embedded in the community’s lived experiences and shared values.

Greek Philosophy and the Distinct Nature of the Polis

Greek philosophy provides crucial insights into the polis as a unique form of human association. For Aristotle, the polis was not merely a political unit but an essential part of human existence. In his Politics, Aristotle described humans as zoon politikon—political animals—whose nature is fulfilled through participation in the polis. This community was not an abstract construct but a tangible and necessary framework for achieving the good life. The polis integrated social, ethical, and political dimensions, making it a holistic entity rather than a specialized institution. Its purpose was not efficiency or order, as in the modern state, but the cultivation of virtue and the realization of human potential.

Plato, too, underscored the polis’s ethical and philosophical dimensions. In The Republic, he envisioned an ideal polis governed by philosopher-kings, where the community structure reflected a harmonious order mirroring the human soul. While Plato’s idealism differed from the practical realities of most Greek poleis, his work highlights the polis’s focus on the collective pursuit of justice and the good. This contrasts sharply with the modern state’s emphasis on individual rights, contractual governance, and territorial sovereignty. In the polis, governance was inseparable from the pursuit of communal excellence, whereas the state prioritizes institutional stability and legal codification.

Misrepresenting the Polis and Civitas as States

Mischaracterizing the polis and civitas as states imposes a linear narrative of political development that distorts the diversity of historical forms. This narrative assumes that ancient communities like the polis and civitas were embryonic states, steadily evolving toward the modern paradigm. Such an interpretation fails to recognize that these ancient forms were fundamentally different, rooted in shared customs, face-to-face participation, and a communal sense of identity. The polis was not a proto-state but a distinct mode of human organization that cannot be understood through the lens of sovereignty, bureaucracy, or territoriality.

For example, Athens, often celebrated as the archetype of democracy, exemplified the participatory nature of the polis. Citizens gathered in the ekklesia (assembly) to debate and decide on public matters directly, without the mediation of representatives or institutions. This direct engagement was a political process and a cultural and ethical practice reinforcing communal bonds. Similarly, in Sparta, governance was shared among multiple institutions, including the dual kingship, the gerousia (council of elders), and the apella (assembly). These structures reflected a commitment to balance and collective responsibility rather than the centralized authority characteristic of the modern state.

The Holistic Integration of Life in the Polis

The polis was a holistic entity where political, social, and religious life were inseparably intertwined. Public festivals, religious rituals, and civic duties were all aspects of the same communal existence. For instance, the Panathenaic Festival in Athens celebrated not only the city’s patron deity, Athena, but also the unity and identity of its citizens. Participation in these events was both a religious act and a reaffirmation of one’s role in the polis. This integration contrasts sharply with the compartmentalization of life in the modern state, where political, social, and religious spheres are often strictly separated.

Similarly, legal practices in the polis were deeply embedded in communal norms and traditions. In Athens, the legal system relied on large citizen juries, often numbering in the hundreds, to ensure that decisions reflected the community’s values rather than the dictates of a professional judiciary. This participatory approach to law underscores the polis’s emphasis on collective deliberation and shared responsibility. In contrast, the modern state’s legal systems are administered by specialized institutions that operate independently of direct citizen involvement, reflecting the impersonal nature of modern governance.

The Roman Civitas: A Different Model of Community

Like the polis, the Roman civitas was a communal organization rooted in shared traditions and active participation. Unlike the modern state, which is characterized by territorial sovereignty and centralized institutions, the civitas was defined by the relationships among its members. Roman citizenship was not merely a legal status but a deeply ingrained social and moral identity. Citizens were bound by mutual obligations and shared values, with political authority emerging from the community’s collective will rather than from a separate ruling apparatus.

The civitas was also notable for its emphasis on legal and cultural integration. As Rome expanded, it incorporated conquered peoples into its political framework, granting them citizenship and allowing them to participate in the res publica. This inclusive approach reflects the communal and participatory ethos of the civitas, which prioritized shared identity and mutual obligation over territorial control or bureaucratic administration. The modern state, by contrast, often defines citizenship in terms of legal rights and territorial residence, emphasizing the individual’s relationship with the state rather than their integration into a communal whole.

Lessons for Modern Political Thought

The polis and civitas offer valuable lessons for contemporary political theory. Their emphasis on active participation, communal responsibility, and integrating public and private life challenges the atomization and bureaucratization of modern politics. In the polis, citizenship was not a passive status but an active practice, requiring individuals to engage directly in the community’s life. This model contrasts with the modern state, where political participation is often limited to voting or other symbolic acts mediated by complex institutional structures.

For instance, contemporary movements advocating for participatory democracy or community-based governance draw inspiration from the ancient polis. These movements seek to reclaim the sense of agency and collective responsibility that characterized ancient communities. Similarly, debates about the role of tradition and shared values in shaping public life can benefit from a deeper understanding of the civitas, where law and governance are grounded in communal consensus rather than abstract principles.

The Enduring Relevance of the Polis and Civitas

Understanding the polis and civitas on their own terms allows us to appreciate the diversity of political organization in human history. These forms were not precursors to the modern state but distinct entities with their own logic and purpose. By studying them, we can expand our understanding of what is possible in political life, moving beyond the constraints of modern assumptions. The participatory ethos of the polis and the communal integration of the civitas offer alternative models of governance that prioritize community, responsibility, and active engagement.

In conclusion, the ancient polis and Roman civitas were not states in the modern sense but unique forms of communal organization rooted in shared customs, traditions, and participation. To label them as states imposes anachronistic assumptions that obscure their distinctiveness and the lessons they offer for contemporary political thought. Recognizing the uniqueness of these ancient forms enriches our understanding of history and provides valuable insights into the possibilities of human association and governance.

Conclusion

The Greek polis and Roman civitas stand as unique historical examples of communal organization that defy the modern concept of the state. These ancient communities were deeply rooted in shared customs, traditions, and active participation, distinguishing them from the impersonal and bureaucratic systems that characterize modern states. By misrepresenting them as early forms of the state, we risk distorting their essence and losing sight of the alternative models of governance they represent. Understanding the polis and civitas on their own terms allows us to better appreciate their distinctiveness and contributions to political thought.

At the heart of the polis and civitas was a commitment to collective responsibility and the active engagement of citizens in public life. In these societies, governance was an extension of communal identity rather than a separate, centralized authority. The participatory ethos of the polis, where citizens deliberated directly on matters of governance, and the civitas, with its emphasis on shared obligations and legal traditions, reflect a fundamentally different understanding of political life. These systems prioritized the cultivation of virtue, justice, and mutual obligation over the efficiency or control emphasized by the modern state.

The lessons of the polis and civitas resonate in contemporary debates about political alienation, community, and civic engagement. In an era where politics often feels distant and impersonal, the participatory practices and communal bonds of these ancient systems provide a counterpoint to the atomization and bureaucracy of modern governance. By revisiting these ancient models, we can explore alternative approaches to political organization that emphasize active participation, shared responsibility, and integrating public and private life.

Ultimately, the polis and civitas challenge us to think more broadly about the possibilities of human political association. They remind us that governance need not be confined to the hierarchical, sovereign frameworks of the modern state. Instead, these ancient forms offer a vision of politics as a deeply integrated and participatory endeavor rooted in the collective flourishing of communities. By understanding the polis and civitas not as precursors to the state but as distinct and sophisticated systems in their own right, we enrich our understanding of political history and open the door to imagining new possibilities for the future.

The post Revisiting Ancient Communities: Understanding the Polis and Civitas Beyond the Modern State appeared first on The Miskatonian.

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.

The post Getting Leo Strauss Right and Wrong appeared first on The Miskatonian.

Fashion, despite being a multibillion-dollar industry in our age of consumer capitalism, tends to be forgotten, if not demeaned, in the high intellectual circles of academia and politics, but not to the point it becomes irrelevant. Rather, it becomes an introspective, even esoteric element of the struggle for power and authority.

For those familiar with such intricacies, some names and references should come to mind with no trouble, such as Martin Greenfield, Savile Row, and, interestingly, Michael Anton.

The first could be a bit forced since Martin Greenfield is known as the tailor-to-go of many American Presidents, whereas the second might be easier to understand since Savile Row is the street in London known for hosting a number of high-end bespoke suit boutiques and tailor workshops.

But Michael Anton? What does the former Trump administration officer have to do with fashion, and more importantly, why should we care about it?

For starters, Michael Anton is not merely anyone in the political philosophy sphere in the United States: a senior fellow at the (West Coast Straussian) Claremont Institute, which frequently publishes his tirades in their Claremont Review of Books (both under his own name and pseudonymously), Anton also worked in the financial sector for Citigroup and Blackrock, as well as a speechwriter for for Rupert Murdoch, Rudy Giuliani, Condoleezza Rice and, according to some, even George W. Bush himself.

The student of Harry V. Jaffa ended up appointed by Donald Trump to the National Security Council as his Deputy Assistant for Strategic Communications, a short stint in the big leagues before returning to his natural element, education, with a dual job as a tenured professor at Hillsdale College’s DC grad school campus and as a member of the National Board for Education Sciences that oversees the US Department of Education.

In addition to this outstanding list of achievements, Michael Anton, who not only is a top scholar of Niccolò Machiavelli, also managed to publish a book on men’s fashion around 2006, before his shot at politics. Under the pseudonym of Nicholas Antongiavanni, he parodied Harvey C. Mansfield’s translation of Machiavelli’s The Prince and tried to offer his aesthetic advice to John Elkann, the leading scion of the Italian Agnelli family that owns and controls a large share of the Italian (and North American) automobile industry through their stakes in Fiat Chrysler.

This little book, The Suit, has become since then a guilty pleasure and a working guide on men’s fashion for many others in business and politics in the United States, and among those inspired by it, we could count the former president of the Mises Institute, Jeff Deist, who in 2022 gave a talk on this very topic to a select group of young fellows, including myself, on how to dress well on a budget.

I remember clearly having talked to Jeff after his lecture and mentioning Anton’s book, with which he indeed was familiar, and from which he took a couple of lessons he adapted for us in his presentation.

Of course, the perspectives of Anton and Deist differed in many senses, for Anton was trying to promote the ‘higher’ political virtue of Dandy-ism for the merchant-princes of today, whereas Deist was merely guiding a couple of young and talented, albeit hippy-ish, economics and politics scholars to better their appearance and improve the overall image of the Austrolibertarian movement as one of well-adjusted professionals.

We could mention that both the Claremont and the Mises Institutes, under their respective influence of Anton and Deist, adopted a more populist approach in their strategy, getting closer to Trumpism in the US and insisting, at several points, on the merit of secession in case the American Left were to retake power at a federal level.

But this essay is about fashion more than about politics, so with this mention, we should consider instead other issues that are more relevant to our topics, such as dandiness and the general aesthetic men have in modern society, irrespective of their politics.

I begin with the mention of dandiness, or Dandy-ism, for it is deeply linked to XIXth century Romanticism, and even if some precedents of such phenomenon are found in both the macaroni fashion of powdered wigs and a certain bourgeois aesthetic of the musk-perfumed, street mobs of the Thermidorian Reaction during the French Revolution (appropriately called Muscadins), it really gets into its own with the advent of the Napoleonic Age, with figures such as Marshal-King Joachim Murat and poet-revolutionary Lord Byron noted for the emphasis they put on their personal fashion in their respective lives and careers.

The Muscadins, in particular, represented a reactionary trend to the fashion adopted during the Revolution, for their well-maintained appearance was a direct contrast to that of the Jacobin sans-culottes, which they opposed, since they were the thugs of Robespierre, the fanatical tyrant the moderate faction they supported had just deposed.

Napoleon’s second-in-command Murat, later on, took on the style of the French jeunesse dorée (the aristocratic golden youth that survived the Revolution) despite not being of noble descent and ended up becoming King of Naples, his many portraits made during his stellar rise under his brother-in-law’s protection painting an image of a well-dressed officer with a knack for dashing hussar uniforms to distinguish himself both as a horseman in battle and as a statesman in court.

As for Lord Byron, his dandy-ish tendencies are more documented among his acquaintances than for himself since many of his friends, such as the Comte d’Orsay, copied the double-breasted sportscoat and top hat style of George Bryan “Beau” Brummell, the original Dandy who defined the general masculine aesthetic during the regency and reign of George IV (of whom Brummell was also a friend).

In any case, such links between men’s fashion and politics are not new, but they seem to represent a particular expression of the dialectical forces in history, with styles getting adopted and rejected in consideration of the power forces at play.

Other examples in history could include the Phrygian cap adopted during the same French Revolution, the fez imposed from North Africa to the rest of the Ottoman Empire in the XIXth century, the expeditionary uniforms of the colonial Belle Époque later hijacked by the many fascist movements of the 20s and 30s (with Hugo Boss dressing the German Army during that time), and the leather jackets popularized by James Dean into what became the greaser movement during the 50s.

But back to Michael Anton’s The Suit and Jeff Deist’s advice on professional clothing, there is an interesting trend on how the modern Right in the United States has decided to present their men in the trenches of political and business war, and that is with the relatively simple, yet elegant combination of the classic suit.

Other, less formal variations of the overall ‘rightist’ attire also include Hawaiian shirts and a non-threatening ‘business casual’ look that lacks symbolism but still represents the last shades of order from the conservative paradigm of life after World War II in America.

There is, of course, the counterpart in the Left, both domestic and foreign, with many differing styles from the guerrilla look to the Mao suit and, lately, to the corporate-approved look of flannel shirts and jeans that make a parody of the working attire of blue-collar workers.

Men’s fashion, as such, is not simply the cloth that covers our bodies from heat and cold in the open but is, by all means, a statement of our political inclinations in an increasingly polarized world where our external appearances define leanings and loyalties from the most simple visual cues.

In our (more or less) global market economy, options for menswear are as diverse as their combinations can be. Every piece of clothing can be found in cheaply mass-produced and finely crafted and tailored versions. Clothing styles, thus, depend not only on different wealth levels among individuals and populations but also on personal and cultural taste, which, by default, can say more about the actual status of a person than the number of their bank accounts.

For our titular political dandy, Michael Anton, the mark of class in power and industry is the bespoke suit tailored to the specific people they are made for.

In his many essays and interviews on the topic, Anton even goes as far as to draw a certain genealogy of fashion styles adopted by US presidents, commenting on their respective rises and falls according to whether they were true to themselves by getting into the world of custom-made, high fashion, his favorite examples being those of JFK, Lyndon Johnson, Nixon, and W. (Bush Jr.), and when it comes to style, he also favors two particular national traditions, the British of Saville Row bespoke tailoring, and the Italian of the Milanese fashion houses that dressed the dear prince of his sartorial mirror, Gianni Agnelli, grandfather and predecessor of the aforementioned John Elkann.

He does not seem to care too much about the actual looks of the clothes as long as they represent this idea of the well-dressed dandy, the “stylish dresser“, that varies “the modes of his clothing, and, while always avoiding those which should not exist at all, he judiciously mixes models, colors, and patterns to effect a less studied and more nonchalant look.”

But Anton, like many other aesthetes of his kind, also proudly leans into some of the most problematic aspects of dandyism, that is, merely being a “Clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office, and existence consists in the wearing of Clothes. Every faculty of his soul, spirit, purse, and person is heroically consecrated to this one object, the wearing of Clothes wisely and well: so that as others dress to live, he lives to dress…” as wisely put by Thomas Carlyle in his novel Sartor Resartus.

Now, the issue may not be very well, only about the fact of dressing well for the sake of dressing well, for this practice reveals a larger socioeconomic reality that many other up-and-coming dandies and aesthetes may come into: dressing well is ridiculously expensive.

I am not even talking about bespoke suits when it comes to prices, but even about chain store, prêt-à–porter clothing, which, when cheap usually means low quality but easily replaceable.

A solution for such a problem seems to be lying around in Jeff Deist’s advice: that is, to find good quality clothing that will mean their actual costs in time. Or at least that will keep their subjective value at the moment of purchase up to the end of their service life.

Maybe behind his reasoning was an unspoken reference to the Sam Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness, which states that poorer people stay in poverty given that the products they buy, especially when it comes to clothing, are indeed cheaper but subpar, quality-wise, thus needing more frequent replacement that adds up into higher expenses in the long run compared to more expensive clothes that are bought at higher costs at first but need no replacement for a longer time, thus cutting replacement costs in the same time span.

After all, Deist belongs to the Austrian School tradition in economics, and one of their tenets is the idea of time preference, the valuation of a certain good in the present compared to the future and, with it, the cost opportunity of acquiring it in different moments.

A coincidence in both Anton’s and Deist’s outlook on men’s fashion is the reference to Brooks Brothers as a common brand for formal wear, while at first demeaning it as not dandy-ish enough and looking at it approvingly for its formality and long-term use quality. And yet, Bro Bro is not a brand affordable for everyone, at least not outside the circles these two belong to.

***

At this point, I could mention my own journey into men’s fashion and aesthetics as one that mirrors pretty much everything else in my life: through intergenerational learning and tradition and the comparative method.

I remember clearly the different kinds of suits, both bespoke and shelf-bought, my father was wearing from when I was a toddler to when I graduated college, and how with time, he slowly switched to a more relaxed everyday look with jeans, chinos, and tweed sports jackets, as well as his weekend outfits, from branded tracksuits when we used to do sports together to the more practical Hilfiger windbreakers we both still wear every now and then. My dad, as the pragmatic man he was and still is in these aspects, usually left his clothing choices to my mom, who was more knowledgeable about brands, textures, and styles.

It should be no surprise, then, that the styles I’ve adopted in my life have been deeply influenced by their own perspectives on fashion, perspectives that were born of their many work travels during the late 80s and early 90s.

If I were to put a tag on them, on us, when it comes to our fashion, I would call us preppy. Or posh, as a former girlfriend of mine used to call me. Pastel colors, knitted sweaters, polo shirts… The idea of what we used and still wear was to look serious. Not elegant per se, nor particularly wealthy, but serious. A high contrast to what most of our Hispanic American countrymen would try and less apparent than what our Italian fellows would show. Very American, in a sense. Or no-nonsense, as it could be better put.

But there was not a political or ideological meaning in our appearance, not at first, anyway. We tried to look like serious people: a serious professor, a serious lawyer, a serious journalist, a serious wife, a serious husband, a serious child, and a serious student. We showed our faces and showed our clothes as seriously as anyone with clean minds and clean hands could do.

But as soon as the culture wars began to affect us during my early adolescence, our clothing became a statement: what used to be a smart look for my parents soon took regal and religious undertones, and so did mine. My dad wearing suits was a direct challenge to his uncaring Marxist colleagues at work and the progressive parents of other kids at my school, and my mom wearing high fashion and crosses in her jewelry became an aesthetic scolding to the women in her circles. We didn’t change, but our circumstances did and the clothes we wore took meanings we did not expect at first but that we embraced at last.

My first aesthetic rebellions began as such: one year I tried to be a t-shirt, jeans, and hoodie-wearing teenager, but that did not last long, and soon enough I was back at polo shirts and chinos, a look I kept in college after my prep school hiatus in which as part of our uniform we had to wear our bespoke suits with the school’s coat of arms on the breast pocket every Monday. I now look back at those years with fond memories.

By the end of that period in high school, I began to find my own style in unexpected ways, such as the beige linen suit I wore during many Model United Nations debates and for my school government campaign, which has followed me until now, and the classic navy sports jacket and khakis that many other preps have used in history.

A later aesthetic rebellion had me rejecting blue jeans altogether as a reaction against the herd mentality, fully embracing chinos as my everyday choice of pants due to their easier compatibility with more formal styles.

But as I entered grad school, I found other, more ‘local’ fashions that, if not incompatible with the general style that had been in my family until then, were certainly different and, moreover, were statements themselves. But not of reactionary opposition to the status quo, as we used to do with what we wear, but of a certain belonging to specific communities.

The first of these fashions is the waxed cotton jacket, commonly called a Barbour jacket by the quintessential brand that makes them. I had known about these jackets for a while before I got my first one, but the moment I acquired my own, I realized the many paradoxes of this military-looking jacket, usually used in hunting trips, being a central piece of the preppy fashion style.

Maybe because it is particularly suited to a (New) England autumn weather, which makes it useful both for the campus of an Ivy League university and for the forests surrounding the estates of the families that send their kids to Oxford and Cambridge in the United Kingdom.

Or maybe because I soon realized this was also the kind of jacket Ernesto ‘Che‘ Guevara wore during his motorcycle trip around South America before he became a hardened guerrilla revolutionary.

It was also a common topic of discussion I had with an investment banker acquainted with my family back in Latin America when he saw me wearing one, and later as we shared the maintenance ritual of re-waxing the jacket every now so to keep it in good waterproof shape.

Somehow, the Barbour jacket is a symbol of a certain kind of person with a certain kind of personal politics, halfway between aristocratic and bourgeois, traditionally conservative until life forces its owner to wear it until broken and worn off in manual work (and become populist) or to ditch it for a more appropriate dress style for government or business, that of the classic suit and tie (and get their personal politics challenged and re-shaped by the implacable forces of the urban, financial world).

Then, there’s a different kind of jacket, or janker to be more exact, that I found in Europe as I arrived to pursue my studies in the Old World.

I had known about this style of jacket for a while as well, with the mandarin collar and the Alpine wool (loden) cloth, and while they were apparently strictly Oktoberfest clothing, I soon found that they were also for everyday use in Central Europe, or at least, in Austria and Bavaria, where they are traditional garments.

The trachtenjanker, as I found they were called, was not only a local fashion but also a signal for people of a certain religious quality to find each other in a country (and a region) increasingly polarized by politics.

It should be no surprise, then, that in the same way Dr. Marten boots are a staple of the punk and especially of the skinhead movement (in its apolitical sense, without any far right nor far left connotations) for their working-class aesthetics, the trachtenjanker, in a sense, has become the quintessential piece of clothing in the wardrobes of European royal pretenders, proscribed nobles and traditionalist Catholics, who associate it with the overall vibe of the fallen Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Both my Barbour and my trachtenjanker were hard finds, particularly considering the means I disposed to get them as both a student on a scholarship and a young professional at the start of the corporate ladder at the moment I acquired them.

But somehow, these two jackets represent a political aesthetic truer to my life experiences than whatever a bespoke suit could show, despite Michael Anton’s insistence on the latter as a sign of modern dandyism. They also follow more closely Jeff Deist’s advice on good quality clothing, not specifically tailored, but meant to last and maintain its value for long enough.

I remember having a friend, a fellow law student, back in Latin America tell me that my Hilfiger windbreakers gave me a certain look similar to the ones some Mafia, Camorra & ‘Ndrangheta crown princes had in contemporary movies and series such as Gomorrah. This was certainly not the first time we’d been associated with such dangerous groups on a mere aesthetic similarity, as my dad was both thought to be a CIA agent in university and a mob boss by my high school chaplain due to his preference for dark suits over less formal clothing.

I wonder what my friend’s reflection on me wearing a Barbour or a trachtenjanker could be. Maybe more aristocratic or simply outright pretentious. But unsurprisingly, they are my favorite pieces in my wardrobe. They are particularly unique, even if not bespoke, for they are rare and represent belonging to groups not anyone partakes in. Something of an open secret, but a secret nonetheless.

The old saying asks if the monk makes the habit or if, the other way around, the habit makes the monk. I consider that both ways are right: the monk and his habit are in symbiosis, for the monk cannot be a monk if not in a habit, and the habit marks the quality of the monk as such.

The clothes we wear show our external appearance, among other things, but also mirror our internal choices. The pieces we pick, the fabrics they are made of, the combinations, and the styling all come to a representation of an internal order that says more about the person wearing the clothes than about the clothes themselves.

Fashion also has a communitarian sense: our clothes mark a shared group identity, and they serve to identify our fellow group members in the open and in the wild. They mark our allegiances and our loyalties to our platoons, our places, our times, and our beliefs.

In an age such as ours, Michael Anton’s approach to the bespoke suit as a mark of the higher aesthetic virtue reminds me of Russell Kirk’s take on eccentricity as a conservative value (one of pure individualism, making it more liberal than communitarian). But our age also makes such eccentricities a privilege fewer people can afford nowadays.

I am not an opponent of the bespoke suit, and for instance, I think it’s a much-needed eccentricity to be acquired at the right moment as a rite of passage in adult life. But then again, such a luxury needs to be well-earned, which makes it an incentive, rather than a mere garment, and rather an expensive one, to wear. Many people might never be able to achieve such an objective.

The solution, if so, to this problem lies in authenticity, for being genuine with our personal aesthetics reflecting our internal politics is not really a matter of expensive taste, but rather of good style according to the most basic principles of aesthetics, that is, of order and complementarity, which, ultimately, means nothing but a personal application of the idea of beauty to our personal appearance.

So be it.

The post Fashion as a Political Modality appeared first on The Miskatonian.

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.

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