At some point relatively early in his (1932) “Notes on Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political,” Leo Strauss suggests that according to Schmitt liberalism is akin to living in Plato’s cave.+ Here’s how Strauss puts it J. Harvey Lomax’s translation:
[4] Schmitt's task is determined by the fact that liberalism has failed. The circumstances of this failure are as follows: Liberalism negated the political; yet liberalism has not thereby eliminated the political from the face of the earth but only has hidden it; liberalism has led to politics' being engaged in by means of an anti political mode of discourse. Liberalism has thus killed not the political but only understanding of the political, sincerity regarding the political (65 ff. ). In order to remove the smokescreen over reality that liberalism produces, the political must be made apparent as such and as simply undeniable. The political must first be brought out of the concealment into which liberalism has cast it, so that the question of the state can be seriously put. ([emphasis added] P. 92 in Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue, translated by J. Harvey Lomax University of Chicago Press, 1995.)
On Strauss’ understanding of Schmitt, liberalism is a kind of epistemological and semantic self-undermining failure. It fails to track reality in virtue of its own discursive practices that render reality obscure. Liberalism thereby produces a bad understanding of itself and the challenges it confronts. Crucially because liberalism discursively systematically negates and, thereby, effaces the friend-enemy distinction (which is, as Schmitt puts it, the characteristic ‘criterion’ of the political), it’s in a position where it can track the purported phenomena of social life (in fact it produces these phenomena—the shadows are its ‘entertainment’), but not the underlying reality.
As an aside, I wouldn’t be surprised if Strauss’ terminology here (notice that use of ‘concealment’) is indebted to Heidegger. But I would have to check Strauss’ German for that, but I have not seen the German original ever. (Maybe a reader wants to check?) Strauss himself repeatedly also suggests that Schmitt partially conceals his own position on a number of key issues.
As the ‘Notes’ unfold it becomes clear that according to Strauss, Schmitt has not fully escaped (ahh) the Platonic cave produced by liberalism. This becomes explicit (or is reiterated) in the final paragraph, “(35 ) We said [par. 14 above] that Schmitt undertakes the critique of liberalism in a liberal world; and we meant thereby that his critique of liberalism occurs in the horizon of liberalism; his unliberal tendency is restrained by the still unvanquished "systematics of liberal thought [that is, liberalism—ES."” (Emphasis added.)
In paragraph 14, we learn two important things. First, that the then contemporary manifestation of the discursive negation of the political is what we may call the ‘philosophy of culture of neo-Kantianism’ (the ruling philosophy in the period before the collapse of Weimar). And, second, this species of liberalism has forgotten its own older, Hobbesian foundation: “sheltered by and engrossed in a world of culture, forgets the foundation of culture, the state of nature, that is, human nature in its dangerousness and endangeredness.” (p. 101)
Now, before I continue, while I am not not an expert on neo-Kantianism, I don’t think this is a silly claim. Anyone who reads Kant’s philosophy of right or his political essays will see that Kant himself is building on Hobbesian foundations. But these foundations are obscured in neo-Kantianism (including, one may note, in Rawls’ tendency to treat Hobbes and Kant as having opposing views on the aims of political life).
And so we also learn that in a certain sense, Strauss agrees with Schmitt that the very success of liberalism has created a cave in which liberals fail to track reality in virtue of their own discursive practices that render such reality obscure. In addition, Strauss and Schmitt agree on (to put it a-morally) the dangeroussness of human nature. (This also becomes clear from a quote I discuss below.)
Now, Strauss doesn’t treat Hobbes as a liberal. But he does treat Hobbes as a kind of prime mover behind liberalism in virtue of the fact of, and thereby treats him (perhaps contingently) as responsible for, a whole series of conceptual necessitation claims that become intrinsic of liberalism, quoting Strauss: “Hobbes's foundation for the natural-right claim to the securing of life pure and simple sets the path to the whole system of human rights in the sense of liberalism, if his foundation does not actually make such a course necessary.” (p. 101, [13]) In fact, Strauss insists that the real difference between Hobbes and subsequent liberalism is that Hobbes understand and discerns (“knowing and seeing”) the nature of the political:
Hobbes differs from developed liberalism only, but certainly, by his knowing and seeing against what the liberal ideal of civilization has to be persistently fought for: not merely against rotten institutions, against the evil will of a ruling class, but against the natural evil [that is, dangerousness—ES] of man; in an unliberal world Hobbes forges ahead to lay the foundation of liberalism against the-sit venia verbo-unliberal nature of man, whereas later men, ignorant of their premises and goals, trust in the original goodness (based on God's creation and providence) of human nature or, on the basis of natural-scientific neutrality, nurse hopes for an improvement of nature, hopes unjustified by man's experience of himself. Hobbes, in view of the state of nature, attempts to overcome the state of nature within the limits in which it allows of being overcome, whereas later men either dream up a state of nature or, on the basis of a supposed deeper insight into history and therewith into the essence of man, forget the state of nature. But-in all fairness to later men-ultimately that dreaming and that oblivion are merely the consequence of the negation of the state of nature, merely the consequence of the position of civilization introduced by Hobbes. (p. 101 [13]) [emphasis in original]
In some sense, then, the cave produced by liberalism and the one that Schmitt has not escaped is, on Strauss’ telling, the intended and perhaps unforeseeable effect of Hobbes’ polemical writings (I almost wrote, ‘philosophical prophecy’).
Now, one might be surprised by all of this if one assumes — like some rational choice theorists or Marxist critics of ‘liberal naturalization’ — that Hobbes’s state of nature is about isolated individuals only and so not about the political at all (which, according to Schmitt, necessarily involves groups). In fact, in Schmitt’s account the reality of natural (and artificial) groups is taken as a given.
By contrast, the capacity to confederate is rather important in Hobbes. In his version of the state of nature it is (and I have repeatedly suggested this echoes Glaucon’s account of the origin of justice) a mechanism that is a source of our physical natural equality: “For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination, or by confederacy with others, that are in the same danger with himselfe.” (Chapter 13) [recall] Hobbes couldn’t treat us as natural equals (in the subsequent social contract), if he didn’t also explicitly assume that prior to that ‘we’ naturally have a ‘political’ skill that would allow us to coordinate on or band together against the physically more powerful.
Of course, in Chapter 13, Hobbes is also explicit that the state of nature obtains in the relations of among states, “Kings, and persons of Soveraigne authority, because of their Independency, are in continuall jealousies, and in the state and posture of Gladiators; having their weapons pointing, and their eyes fixed on one another; that is, their Forts, Garrisons, and Guns upon the Frontiers of their Kingdomes; and continuall Spyes upon their neighbours; which is a posture of War.”
Why do these Hobbes quotes matter here? They point to something Strauss is clearly alert to. Unlike Hobbes, Schmitt cannot explain the origin of the political (he has no mechanism that generates or grounds it). In addition, while Schmitt understands the state of nature as one thing only, Hobbes offers an account of different kinds of state of nature as an effect of human dangerousness.
From Strauss’ perspective then, Hobbes’ understanding of the political isn’t merely the effect of dialectically negating the then ruling ideas, whereas for Strauss Schmitt is basically simply himself inverting the then ruling ideas (that is, liberalism) without Hobbes’ rich understanding of man’s place in the cosmos. In fact, Strauss (who is usually not thought of as a Hobbesian) actually explicitly concedes in his own voice that Hobbes “attempts to overcome the state of nature within the limits in which it allows of being overcome.” That is to say, Hobbes acts on proper understanding (and so is not himself in the cave he generated). I don’t mean to suggest Strauss thinks the Hobbesian attempt fully succeeds. (Rather, I suspect Strauss thinks the potentially successful attempt is corrupted by the subsequent success of liberalism.)
Now, if one pays attention to Strauss’ terminology in the passage from par [13] that I have quoted at length, liberalism is a species (or has an ideal) of civilization.* In Schmitt’s Concept of the Political, civilization is mentioned twice and in neither case is it treated with respect or as something worth having. Strauss makes explicit that Schmitt rejects the civilizational ideal (p. 112, [27]). But unlike Schmitt Strauss does not imply that he rejects civilization.** Rather, as I will argue in a future post, Strauss rejects the liberal variant, but not civilization as such. To be continued…
+I thank my undergraduate students for discussion, especially Dounia Chelbat for her persistent follow up questions.
*In fact, in his own voice Strauss says, “Hobbes, to a much higher degree than Bacon, for example, is the author of the ideal of civilization.”
**See also Robert Howse (2014) Leo Strauss Man of Peace. Cambridge University Press, chapter 2. As it happens, I agree with Howse on this important point, but as will become clear subsequently I disagree with Howse on what Strauss means by ‘civilization.’
I don't really see the need to engage with Schmitt. AFAICT, he fills a vacant space in some mental maps of the intellectual world. in the same way that Paul Ryan used to fill the space "Republican policy wonk". Roughly speaking, it's the gap, left by the decline of Marxism/Leninism, in the space "justification for anti-liberal political violence".
But you can get that more succinctly from Hanns Johst https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanns_Johst , to whom only one kind of reply is possible.