On Thoughts on Machiavelli; and Strauss' polemic against Conservatism.
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Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958) explicitly distinguishes between scientific and scholastic works that are in principle detached from present concerns and a tract “for the times.” (p. 55) In so far as it is a tract (and for many stretches it is not), Thoughts on Machiavelli is framed by a polemic in the then-present. The polemic is introduced as follows:
Machiavelli would argue that America owes her greatness not only to her habitual adherence to the principles of freedom and justice, but also to her occasional deviation from them. He would not hesitate to suggest a mischievous interpretation of the Louisiana Purchase and of the fate of the Red Indians. He would conclude that facts like these are an additional proof for his contention that there cannot be a great and glorious society without the equivalent of the murder of Remus by his brother Romulus. (p. 16)
America’s contemporary greatness originates (inevitably) in fraud and genocide. The polemic is neither that such fraud and genocide disqualify the principles of freedom and justice built on them (Strauss keeps the hermeneutics of suspicion at arm’s length) nor to invite the reader into contemplating reparations and restoration. Rather, the polemical point is that what we may call ‘classical social theory’ (which for present purposes includes Machiavelli and the moderns inspired by him as well as the classics they revolted against) is an apt framework by which to understand the American polity, including the trade-offs it faces. Classical social theory is qualitative and normative in character and in its presuppositions and methods quite distinct from modern (empirical) social science.*
Now, classical social theory is, as it were, the understanding of social reality held in common by those learned for whom men, polities, and civilizations are necessarily mortal (p. 172), but themselves inscribed in a larger cyclical cosmos itself punctuated by natural cataclysm (although potentially shaped by a more general providence). This is a social reality in which the intensive growth of the economy is wholly unfamiliar, and wealth is rooted in land, plunder, or trade, and growth is primarily the effect of plunder or increases in trade and numbers. It is quite natural to think that modernity has overcome classical social theory.
In the classical social theory reconstructed by Strauss from the source material in Machiavelli, America is an imperial republic. This is most obviously so during the long march West of Manifest Destiny alongside its embrace of a sphere of influence known as the Monroe doctrine. But a more cosmopolitan and liberal empire in the spirit of Kant’s Perpetual Peace was announced by President Wilson (symbolized by the 14 points and the League of Nations), and then revitalized by FDR and his successors with military bases around the globe, and a whole range of new international organizations and treaties. Long before Negri and Hardt, Strauss theorizes American empire.
As an aside, we are told that the book originates in public lectures of 1953 and was then published in 1958. By that the time author (Leo Strauss) had moved to The University of Chicago, but it is before the very public polemics (triggered by the 1962 publication of Herbert J. Storing (ed.) Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics) that would antagonize social scientists against his school. That is, this is a book that dates from the Eisenhower years: the cold war, McCarthy, and Dien Bien Phu; but before the fracturing of the New Deal Coalition. For our purposes, it is worth adding that the “top income tax rate reached above 90% from 1944 through 1963.”
Be that as it may, according to classical social theory imperial republics follow a predictable dynamics:
In the long run, the disastrous effects of great and excessive private wealth will make themselves felt. In addition, once the imperial republic has reached a state of unchallengeable supremacy, salutary necessity ceases to operate and decline inevitably follows. Finally, the imperial republic destroys the freedom of all other republics and rules over them much more oppressively than any non-barbarous prince would. (p. 261)
With the benefit of hindsight, we may say in this vocabulary: the cold war victory ended ‘salutary necessity’ and provided the framework for a politics of massive private accumulation since the 1990s. As predicted by classical social theory, this wealth was also used to buy political influence; the very wealthy cushioned the effect of the great 2007-2009 crash on themselves at the expense of everyone else. The visible effect of this has been to convince the majority that who you know is crucial to get ahead; and to prefer the crook who says that he works for us over those that speak the language of impartiality and common good. We have now reached the precipice, where we are about to enter an era of enormous private gains collected by the imperial republic’s leadership, and the very well-connected oligarchs, from the payoffs and tributes collected directly and indirectly from other republics amidst a more general erosion of the non-zero-sum trading frameworks of the last three-quarter-century. In the shadows, the fracturing of such an empire is the feeding ground of New Princes.
There is no evidence that Strauss believed that works like Thoughts on Machiavelli could undermine the dynamics diagnosed by classical social theory. Yet, somewhat surprisingly, in the long closing paragraph of the book Strauss takes aim at the self-described ‘conservatives’ of his own age. These get something importantly wrong about their role in such dynamics.
This criticism is announced much earlier in the work by a somewhat obscure remark:
Bowing to the principle of authority is sterile if it is not followed by surrender to authority itself, i.e., to this or that authority. If this step is not taken one will remain enmeshed in the religious longing or the religiosity so characteristic of our centuries, and will not be liberated by religion proper. (pp. 165-166 [Emphasis added])
Bowing to the principle of authority is what conservatives (since Burke) invite us to do. But from Strauss’ perspective our age’s conservatives are actually unable to walk the walk. They do not truly surrender to authority. Why this is so is left unclear, but presumably it has something to do with the fact that modern conservatives are, in fact, unable or unwilling to recognize true hierarchy to which submission would be owed. They are, in fact, fearless.
The comment is left hanging, but Strauss returns to the theme, as I said, in the closing paragraph of the book. There he does so by distinguishing between the ‘conservatism’ of the classics (Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Polybius—the folks against whom Machiavelli and the moderns rebelled) and the conservatives of his own age. It will inevitably be somewhat disorienting if you are not used to his prose, but here I must quote:
The classics were for almost all practical purposes what now are called conservatives. In contradistinction to many present day conservatives however, they knew that one cannot be distrustful of political or social change without being distrustful of technological change. Therefore they did not favor the encouragement of inventions, except perhaps in tyrannies, i.e., in regimes the change of which is manifestly desirable. They demanded the strict moral-political supervision of inventions; the good and wise city will determine which inventions are to be made use of and which are to be suppressed. Yet they were forced to make one crucial exception. They had to admit the necessity of encouraging inventions pertaining to the art of war. They had to bow to the necessity of defense or of resistance. This means however that they had to admit that the moral-political supervision of inventions by the good and wise city is necessarily limited by the need of adaptation to the practices of morally inferior cities which scorn such supervision because their end is acquisition or ease. They had to admit in other words that in an important respect the good city has to take its bearings by the practice of bad cities or that the bad impose their law on the good. Only in this point does Machiavelli's contention that the good cannot be good because there are so many bad ones prove to possess a foundation. (198-199)
I have included the last sentence in the quote to give you a sense of the common ground between Machiavelli and “classics” from which Strauss constructs what I have been calling ‘classical social theory.’
Now, context makes clear that these (then) contemporary “conservates” are themselves a reaction to the drawn-out success of Machiavelli and his successors (moderns and modernity). Modern conservatives wish to say no against “political or social change” (the Civil Rights movement and Feminism are stirring, after all) but because they have no interest in giving up the hegemony of the imperial republic, they must keep funding the military-industrial complex. (Eisenhower’s farewell address on the military-industrial complex is a few years into the future.) Basic science and technology are needed to stay ahead in the arm’s race.
Now, I don’t think we need to think Strauss is some kind of crypto-materialist in order to recognize that Strauss clearly believes (cf. p. 188 and the criticism of Machiavelli on the artillery) that powerful technological change inevitably will lead to social and political change. As military technology changes all kinds of political status quos are undermined, even if how this change plays out may well be unpredictable to some degree.
Lurking in Strauss, then, is the criticism that while modern conservatives claim to say ‘no’ to social and political change, their (wholly prudent) unwillingness to disarm means they are facilitating the very social and political change they stand against. Modern conservatism (Kirk, Oakeshott, Meyer, etc.) is, in principle, a self-undermining enterprise.+ In addition, modern conservatism lacks what Burnham or Sorel would call a salutary myth.
Here Strauss makes a rather unexpected move. This new myth must involve the necessary end of our civilization:
Besides, the opinion [propagated by the classics] that there occur periodic cataclysms in fact took care of any apprehension regarding an excessive development of technology or regarding the danger that man's inventions might become his masters and his destroyers. Viewed in this light, the natural cataclysms appear as a manifestation of the beneficence of nature. Machiavelli himself expresses this opinion of the natural cataclysms which has been rendered incredible by the experiences of the last centuries. It would seem that the notion of the beneficence of nature or of the primacy of the Good must be restored by being rethought through a return to the fundamental experiences from which it is derived. (p. 299)
That is, the centuries of technological and economic progress (which coincide with “the fate of the Red Indians”) have led to a great forgetting of the fragility of civilization. (We may hasten to add that on this view even the Great Wars have not shaken this amnesia.) This is characteristic of “the parochial character of the 19th and 20th century outlook which inevitably pretends to be wider than that of any earlier age.” (p. 231)
Here the ‘beneficence of nature’ is, in fact, the eternal return of cosmic cataclysms. From that vantage point, mutually assured destruction is indeed a relatively minor cosmic blimp.
Now, complacent readers will undoubtedly shake their heads at Strauss who clearly drank a heavy dose of Nietzsche, Spengler, Schmitt, and Heidegger. I am myself no friend of this way of organizing thought. But even so, condescension would be a mistake; and the reason why it is a mistake can be discerned in a moment’s reflection on the situation of our young.
It is a familiar fact among educators that now the most noble among our students and children are marked by the thought that we are living on borrowed time and that a climate cataclysm is not just unfolding but already occurring. And it is an iron law of classical social theory that no republic can survive when there is a persistent, unbridgeable mismatch between its elites and its rising-would-be-leaders.
For, Strauss’ Machiavelli remains dangerous not because of this or that claim in classical social theory, but because he teaches the young to despise and conspire against their elders when these are already worthy of contempt. Without reverence and deference there is instability (p. 231). Once it is widely felt among the young that our polity is in “need of improvement and therefore of dangerous change,” (p. 94) the search for new prophets begins. In our tradition, Machiavelli offers the framework for those “who desires that these new modes and orders be adopted.” (p. 105)
* ‘Classical social theory’ is a term of art.
+One might well wonder how the classic/authentic conservatives escape the dilemma he has diagnosed for the moderns. The short answer is they do not. But they understand the trade-off involved and so achieve a more genuine understanding.