Strauss (and Auden) on the open society ca 1941

Many people are contacting me about the situation in Amsterdam. I have a lot to say about that, but I hope to do so when the news-cycle has moved on. (Regular readers know I increasingly prefer to avoid contributing to culture wars.) For now, all I can state is that I appreciate the expressions of concern and that I have not found myself in any threatening situations.

In February 1941, Leo Strauss gave a lecture at the New School, “German Nihilism;” it was published much later in Interpretation, spring 1999, Vol. 26, No. 3, pp. 353-78 (HT Jeffrey Bernstein).” The lecture is very important in illuminating Strauss’ response to Schmitt (recall this post; and this one, which prompted it.) In my last post (last year) on the lecture, I contested the idea (defended by Bernstein and also Robert Howse) that Strauss’ genuine (civilisational) criticisms of Schmitt were given from the perspective from or in support of liberalism.

As it happens, when I argued all that, I was unaware of the fact that in December 2022, Matthew Rose had published a rather sophisticated set of reflections on the significance of that lecture in First Things (here). Rose’s (2021) A World after Liberalism: Five Thinkers Who Inspired the Radical Right is one of the few genuinely insightful and sober books on right wing critics of liberalism. (That’s not an endorsement of the substantive views he also defends.) Rose’s First Things essay is a clever use of Strauss to explain the limitations of education as exhortation in the service of liberal ideals today. And it expresses many things worth repeating, especially as the impulse to exhort will be tempting.

Rose implies that Strauss is attracted to a view that liberal society presupposes and requires what one may call ‘moral capital’ derived from illiberal ones. As Rose puts it, Strauss’ “thesis” was “an open society requires strengthening by moral and political imaginations that have been formed in closed societies.” (Emphasis added.) Now, it’s possible that Strauss thought this (let’s call this the “blended view”), but the implication is that by itself liberal society is wholly unstable and has a natural termination date. The latter is a somewhat conventional critique of liberalism.

It is, however, unclear how in an open society one can secure the right sort of ideas that are somehow not naturally formed in it, but actively hostile to it. This seems impossible, unless one assumes that either one can import people with closed society habits of thought or that one can find adequate teachers for it. The former seems unlikely to appeal to the critics of the open society, whereas it is not obvious how one could identify the latter since their teachings are so out of sync with the open society. Yet, somewhat oddly, Rose also implies that Strauss thought liberalism could be saved: “[Strauss] believed that this kind of education could open the aristocratic horizon that citizens of an open society most desperately need, if they wish to save liberalism from itself.” Something has gone off the rails.

To be sure, I agree with Rose that Strauss wished to promote, as I argued last year, an admixture of aristocracy into the thought of the age. But not to save liberalism; rather in the lecture he defends a civilizational empire which he associates with the British. (At that point the US was still formally neutral in the war, so the aristocratic defense of Britain may well have been decidedly odd for some Americans.) So far, I have not given you a reason to care what Strauss thought in 1941.

Now, at one point, Strauss raises the question “what is the motive underlying the protest against modern civilisation” by the young German nihilists he has been describing. Strauss’ articulation of that perspective draws on a contrast between open and closed societies. Let me quote the passage that I have in mind first:

The answer must be: it is a moral protest. That protest proceeds from the conviction that the internationalism inherent in modern civilisation, or, more precisely, that the establishment of a perfectly open society which is as it were the goal of modem civilisation, and therefore all aspirations directed toward that goal, are irreconcilable with the basic demands of moral life. That protest proceeds from the conviction that the root of all moral life is essentially and therefore eternally the closed society; from the conviction that the open society is bound to be, if not immoral, at least amoral: the meeting ground of seekers of pleasure, of gain, of irresponsible power, indeed of any kind of irresponsibility and lack of seriousness.

Moral life, it is asserted, means serious life. Seriousness, and the ceremonial of seriousness—the flag and the oath to the flag—, are the distinctive features of the closed society, of the society which by its very nature, is constantly confronted with, and basically oriented toward, the Ernstfall, the serious moment, M-day, war. Only life in such a tense atmosphere, only a life which is based on constant awareness of the sacrifices to which it owes its existence, and of the necessity, the duty of sacrifice of life and all worldly goods, is truly human: the sublime is unknown to the open society. The societies of the West which claim to aspire toward the open society, actually are closed societies in a state of disintegration: their moral value, their respectability, depends entirely on their still being closed societies.

None of this quote is Strauss’ own perspective. He is ventriloquizing (or, if you prefer, rational re-consctructing) the point of view of the young German nihilists. To be sure, he is doing so in a vocabulary that is not their own because he is drawing on Schmitt’s and Junger’s framework and Bergson’s contrast between open and closed societies (articulated in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion). Crucially, the young nihilists treat the societies of the West not as open societies, but as failed closed societies (“in a state of disintegrations”).

Popper was then in in exile New Zealand so there is no reason to associate Strauss’ argument with influence by or on Popper. However, Strauss was not alone to use the distinction between open and closed society in 1941. About the same time, a very different kind of thinker, the poet and critic Auden, who also lived in New York city then, also used it in an essay, “Criticism in a Mass Society.” (I have no idea whether Auden and Strauss were aware of each other’s thinking then.)

In fact, Auden writes, “The failure of the human race to acquire the habits that an open society demands if it is to function properly, is leading an increasing number of people to the conclusion that an open society is impossible, and that, therefore, the only escape from economic and spiritual disaster is to return as quickly as possible to a closed type of society.” Now, Auden, explicitly rejects the view that Rose attributes to Strauss: “We have in fact no choice at all; we have to adapt ourselves to an open society or perish.” And what’s needed for this is not the use of virtues or habits derived from the closed society; rather “an open society which demands completely new” habits of mind. Let’s call Auden’s the ‘adaptationist view’ of the open society.

From the perspective of the young nihilists ‘open societies’ only exist as a kind of immanent yet unreachable teleological goal inherent in the internationalism of modern society. Connecting the open society with internationalism is not far from Bergson’s take; for him the open society is “deemed in principle to embrace all of humanity.” (p. 267) However, in Strauss’ rational reconstruction such internationalism is associated with a reign of pleasure (which is not so in Bergson), this immanent goal is neither Marxism nor Kantian perpetual peace, but rather a kind of frivolous utilitarianism/epicureanisn.

Strauss then appears to switch gears and states the following:

Let us pursue this argument a little further. The open society, it is asserted, is actually impossible. Its possibility is not proved at all by what is called the progress toward the open society. For that progress is largely fictitious or merely verbal. Certain basic facts of human nature which have been honestly recognized by earlier generations who used to call a spade a spade, are at the present time verbally denied, superficially covered over by fictions legal and others, e.g., by the belief that one can abolish war by pacts not backed by military forces punishing him who breaks the pact, or by calling ministries of war ‘ministries of defence’ or by calling punishment ‘sanctions,’ or by calling capital punishment ‘das hochste Strafmass.’ The open society is morally inferior to the closed society also because the former is based on hypocrisy. [modestly edited]

At first it seems Strauss stops ventriloquizing and is about to develop his own point (“let us pursue…a little further”). But then (“it is asserted”) he seems to be back to ventriloquizing the nihilists’ perspective.

Now, one may wonder why Strauss is ventriloquizing all of this. I think this decision is illuminated in a subsequent paragraph: “The conviction I am trying to describe, is not, to repeat, in its origin a love of war: it is rather a love of morality, a sense of responsibility for endangered morality.” Of course, if Strauss had quoted the nihilists directly themselves we would have concluded that their conviction is rooted in “love of war,” rather than “sense of responsibility for endangered morality.” Again, while I wouldn’t attribute to Bergson the Schmittian existentialism (Ernstfall, etc.) lurking in the nihilist, formally the position is also not far from Bergson’s understanding of the closed society, which is for Bergson explicitly held together by “moral obligation” rooted in our human nature. (To avoid confusion such obligation should not be read in a Kantian or universalist register.)

To the best of my knowledge Strauss does not give his audience a reason to think that he himself rejects this love of morality or, alternatively, a sense of responsibility for endangered morality in the German Nihilism lecture. Now, it’s very difficult to prove a negative proposition like this. So what follows is a bit tentative.

In the essay, Strauss traces the concern for endangered morality to a German philosophical tradition. He then points that “In defending menaced morality, i.e. non-mercenary morality,” — notice how this echoes the description of the German nihilists — “the German philosophers were tempted to overstress the dignity of military virtue, and in very important cases, in the cases of Fichte, Hegel, and Nietzsche, they succumbed to that temptation.”

So, to be sure Strauss clearly rejects the temptation to overstress the dignity of military virtue. But the problem here for Strauss is immoderation in defense of menaced morality, but not defense of menaced morality as such. And the reason why Strauss thinks this immoderation matters is because it generates “contempt for commonsense and the aims of human life, as they are visualized by commonsense.” And it is precisely such moderation that does not undermine the aims of common sense that Strauss ends up praising in English thought: “the English almost always had the very un-German prudence and moderation not to throw out the baby with the bath… the English never indulged in those radical breaks with traditions which played such a role on the continent.”

What’s crucial, then, is that Strauss’ position is not a defense of liberalism as such, but rather the manner in which a cautious liberalism instantiates this prudence and moderation in which reason and common life are reconciled (“i.e. the prudence to conceive of the modem ideals as a reasonable adaptation of the old and eternal ideal of decency, of rule of law, and of that liberty which is not license, to changed circumstances.”)

So, while in the lecture, in his own voice, Strauss explicitly rejects nostalgia for the “impressive past” or a kind of reification of tradition for its own sake, Strauss does think that the original impulse of the nihilists to preserve, even fight for endangered morality for the sake of (ahh) the polis is the correct impulse. However, the manner in which they seek to defend it must not, as it were, head off a cliff.