Leo Strauss and Natural Law: Classical Coda

1789 WAS NOT A GOOD YEAR for the wine of revolution in Burke's view. This is compellingly evidenced in his monograph on the French Revolution which is highly critical of the French Revolution partisans. Burke had the insight to see the French Revolution for what it was, a philosophical, even religious revolution, one which had atheism at its heart. This philosophy fed the masses through intricate arteries of propaganda using labels that are, in themselves, noble-sounding, but which, in actuality, are masks for something altogether demonic: Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. It could equally be the motto of a monastic order, as it could be the motto of wild-eyed Jacobins, but this trilogy of words would certainly mean different things to the man who operated under the evangelical counsels, compared to the man who spurned not only the evangelical counsels, but the Ten Commandments as well.

Prudence is perhaps the key trait of Burke, the principal animator of this practical man addressing practical things. Indeed, Burke calls prudence the "god of this lower world." And yet, Strauss detects an unclassical strain in Burke. There is a Burkean cleavage between reason and sentiment, "a certain emancipation of sentiment and instinct from reason, or a certain depreciation of reason," in Burke. Strauss, 312. It is this which Strauss says "accounts for the nonclassical overtones in Burke's remarks on the difference between theory and practice" which is at the heart of his criticism of the French Revolution and its partisans.

Prudence, there can be no doubt, is a virtue, a habit of great value. And yet, one wonders, how many martyrs doth prudence make? How many prophets does prudence nourish?

While Burke's practical prudence would dampen ideology's recoil, doesn't it also dampen faith's spring? Would Burke confuse "speculatism," that is, theory as ideology which is oblivious to, or a falsification of, reality, an idealism ummoored in reality with something else, with supernatural faith? If not, what does he have to distinguish them? In Burke's Whiggish view of the world, heavy with the feet of clay of inherited constitutions, could the spirited faith of martyrs pitted impractically, imprudently against the judgment of the senatus populusque Romanus have been execrable "speculatism"? Had Burke's girth gotten so swollen with victuals and drink that he no longer hungered after eternal verities? Prophets, it may be observed, like martyrs, tend to be highly imprudent, at least when worldly prudence is the canon by which their words and deeds are adjudged. Most kings find prophets unsettling, irritants, idealists unchained to practical realities that come with rule because they are citizens of a world that they cannot see. How shall prudence judge between ideologue, the foolish martyr and prophet, on the one hand, and the authentic martyr and prophet on the other? Burke relies on his historical English patrimony, and advocates a "historical jurisprudence." Strauss, 316. But doesn't this land us back to the "historical school" of Weber and others that Strauss criticized in the first part of his History and Natural Right? Ultimately, we want to avoid the blindness of practical men, such as Pontius Pilate, and want to side with He who had far less worldly attachments such as Christ. Wasn't the prudent Pontius Pilate both deaf and blind to the Christ that was before him? Quid est veritas? What is truth? What good is political prudence, the "god of this lower world," if it blinds one, like it did Pilate, to the God of the world? Is this where Burke would take us? Strauss intimates that it would be so. "Prudence and 'this lower world' cannot be seen properly without some knowledge of 'the higher world'--without genuine theoria." Strauss, 321. (Strauss should have said fides et ratio, but his atheism prevented him.)

Both Burke, in his way, and Rousseau, in his way, tried to tame Providence. Burke saw the English constitution--the rights of Englishmen--as providentially given. Rousseau saw his time as providentially enlightened. So one saw history as providing the "ought." The other saw history as providing the "is." Both, therefore, settled upon an "idea of History" which was nothing less than "a modification of the traditional belief in Providence." Strauss, 316-17. "That modification," Strauss notes, "is usually described as 'secularization.'" Strauss, 317. He explains:

"Secularization" is the "temporalization" of the spiritual or of the eternal. It is the attempt to integrate the eternal into a temporal context. It therefore presupposes that the eternal is no longer understood as eternal. "Secularization," in other words, presupposes a radical change of thought, a transition of thought from one plane to an entirely different plane. . . . . The "secularization" of the understanding of Providence culminates in the view that the ways of God are scrutable to sufficiently enlightened men.

Strauss, 317. This, Strauss argues, is found in both Rousseau and Burke.

There is a watershed of difference between the belief that the ways of God are scrutable to man, or inscrutable. The tradition never had the temerity to suppose, in an institutional way, that it knew the designs of God in history.

The theological tradition recognized the mysterious character of Providence by the fact that God uses or permits evil for his good ends. It asserted, therefore, that man cannot take his bearings by God's providence but only by God's law, which simply forbids man to do evil.

Strauss, 317. In his daily work, in giving himself his daily bread, natural law, therefore, was what man had to follow. Providence would take care of itself. Providence was God's business. Avoiding sin and promoting virtue was man's business. The hubris involved in supposing one could divine God's Providence led to a deprecation of law:

In proportion as the providential order came to be regarded as intelligible to man, and therefore evil came to be regarded as evidently necessary or useful, the prohibition against doing evil lost its evidence. Hence various ways of action which were previously condemned as evil could no w be regarded as good. The goals of human action were lowered. But is precisely a lowering of these goals which modern political philosophy consciously intended from its very beginning.

Strauss, 317. Strauss finds the commonality between Burke and Rousseau elsewhere also. His insight is that, at the heart of both Rousseau and Burke, one finds an overemphasis on individualism. It is the quarrel that both Rousseau and Burke have with the ancients:

The quarrel between the ancients and the moderns concerns eventually, and perhaps even from the beginning, the status of 'individuality.' Burke himself was still too deeply imbued with the spirit of 'sound antiquity' to allow the concern with individuality to overpower the concern with virtue.

Strauss, 323.

But his successors would not have the benefit of that spiritual capital. Rousseau still had his Plutarch. Burke still had the traditions of the ancients. Neither appear to have had a vibrant faith. As man by then had given the faith all up. Modern man has none of these anchors. He flails in the wind, and his politics has no lasting meaning, either in reason, or in faith. His reason and faith is given not to God, but to some substitute. That is to say, modern man has given himself up to idols.

Leo Strauss and Natural Law: Even Edmund Burke's Infected

EDMUND BURKE IS LEO STRAUSS'S CLOSER. It is with this English Whig, this great figure of Kirkian Conservatives, that Leo Strauss rounds up his work entitled History and Natural Right. Unlike the dissolute Rousseau, who appears to have given himself to the modern Hobbesian and Lockean assumptions and extended them to their radical, revolutionary anti-social, anti-moral, and anti-rational conclusions, the politician Edmund Burke (1729-1797) attempted, perhaps more by force of habit than by absolute principle, a return to the classic notion of natural law. "Burke sided with Cicero and with with Suarez against Hobbes and against Rousseau." Strauss, 295. Burke had the good sense to view "the Parisian philosophers," and their "new morality," with skepticism, and to side instead with "the authors of sound antiquity." Strauss, 295 (quoting Burke). He scoffed at those who, like Rousseau and Hobbes before him, "pretend[ed] to have made discoveries in the terra australis of morality."* Strauss, 295 (quoting Burke).

Burke does, from time to time, adopt the prevailing language of these theorists that he excoriates, but only with a practical, ad hominem purpose. As Strauss observes, Burke "may be said to integrate these notions into a classical or Thomistic framework." Strauss, 296. Burke also speaks within the British constitutional mantle, as he "conceived of the British constitution in a spirit akin to that in which Cicero had conceived of the Roman polity." He was not reactionary--he was, after all a Whig, and a Whig's Whig at that, and may be said to be a classical liberal (he it was that said, to Marx's consternation, "The laws of commerce [meaning the laws of commerce per Adam Smith and other mercantilists] are the laws of Nature, and therefore the laws of God.")--but he was deeply conservative, indisputably reaching back behind the moral upstarts Hume, Rousseau, Locke, and Hobbes.

Edmund Burke

Though Burke did not write any single synthetic, theoretical work on moral philosophy or politics, his entire corpus--of political speeches, tracts, letters, monographs--all evince a practical yet principled man, deeply steeped in classical notions of natural moral law. It was this lodestar which made him so independent in thought and in mind to those of his contemporaries, and allowed him to favor the rights of American colonists and the Irish Catholics, and to oppose Warren Hastings and the French Revolution, against the views of many of his countrymen.

Against Hobbes and Rousseau, Burke clearly saw that man naturally tended toward civil cooperation, some sort of civil society. In the language of the times, he therefore distinguished between the Hobbesian and Rousseauian state of "rude nature," and wrote about a "true state of nature," which included the Aristotelian notion of man as a political animal. Strauss, 296. Against these two also, we find Burke advocating the concept that the "social contract" must include a "partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection." Strauss, 296 (quoting Burke). The social contract was, for Burke, "a contract in almost the same sense in which the whole providential order, 'the great primeval contract of eternal society," can be said to be a contract.'" Strauss, 296-97 (quoting Burke). Thus society and government have a role towards promoting the rule of virtue, of human perfection. These are not the words of a radical, or a libertine, of a Jacobin. Nor are they, however, the words of authoritarianism, a supporter of tyrannical government. There is therefore both a "Burke of Liberty" and a "Burke of Authority" as Winston Churchill denominated it, but yet it was "the same man pursuing the same ends, seeking the same ideals of society and Government, and defending them from assaults, now from one extreme, now from the other." (Winston Churchill, "Consistency in Politics" in Thoughts and Adventures (London: 1934), 40.) Burke was a man who sought to navigate, like a political Odysseus, through the Charybdis of Liberty and the Scylla of Authority.

Burke thought substance more important than process, and therefore did not view democracy as the cure-all, and this for the simple reason that democracy did not assure good government. And what man had a right to, was not necessarily participation in political process (a procedural right),** but the right to good government (which was a substantive right). As Strauss summarizes it:

For the judgment of the man, or the "the will of the man, and their interest, must very often differ." Political power or participation in political power does not belong to the rights of man, because men have a right to good government, and there is no necessary connection between good government and government by the many . . . .

Strauss, 297-98.

Ultimately, Burke appears to have rejected, but only partially, a Cartesian dualism in man, both in morals and in politics. Burke takes man as we find him, a complex, intricate, indivisible man, a composite of body and soul, a composite of individual in society. Burke therefore was deeply distrustful of any kind of political thinking that was pure theory, or pure "speculatism." He rejected a morals of geometry, an ethica de moro geometrico. Instead, Burke incarnated man in the here-and-now, as a countryman, as a family man, as one who was concerned with "one's own." Thus, politics was the practice of the particular, it "presupposes attachment to a particular . . . one's country, one's people, one's religious group, and the like." Strauss, 309. No political system is perfect; and all suffer from the weakness, habits, and foibles of men.

It may be, Strauss suggests, that Burke's distrust of theory, and his reliance on prudence and practical realities, led him to take an anti-theoretical stance. It may be, as Strauss states, that "Burke's opposition to modern 'rationalism' shifts almost insensibly into an opposition to 'rationalism' as such." Strauss, 313. Perhaps in his aversion to the theories of Rousseau and Hobbes, Burke himself stepped into a rejection of political theory in toto. Strauss suggests that perhaps Burke threw out the baby with the bath water: "Burke is not content with defending practical wisdom against the encroachments of theoretical science. He parts company with the Aristotelian tradition by disparaging theory and especially metaphysics. He uses "metaphysics" and "metaphysician" frequently in a derogatory sense." Strauss, 311. Burke does appear to reject the Aristotelian notion of a natural telos, an end in nature, and in human nature specifically. "There is," therefore, "a connection between [Burke's] strictures on metaphysics and the skeptical tendencies of his contemporaries Hume and Rousseau." Strauss, 312.

Homer nods. So does Burke. So do those who do not go beyond Burke.

To a certain extent, Burke suffers from the plight of all conservatives. What is it that one is trying to conserve? Sometimes, the very order one is trying to conserve is unconservative. There are times, it would seem, that a principled conservative would reject the immediate past, because the immediate past institutionalizes a rejection of an earlier, valid order. In other words, conservatism must not simply seek to preserve the cloth of order it has inherited, as the cloth of order may be sullied, stained, torn. One's patrimony, in other words, may need more than just polishing, it may need to be thrown away. If one were to inherit a library of pornography, is this a patrimony that ought to be preserved? A true conservative would have a standard that supersedes, though it might presume the importance of, his patrimony. Conservatism must sometimes seek to wash, to bleach, and to mend an inherited order that those before him ruined or soiled, or that the changing times have made untrue to a more fundamental principle of order. Burke, wed to the British constitution as he received it, appears, never to have gone beyond a first-phase conservatism. He was, for all his greatness, a bourgeois Whig. He was, and is, better than Rousseau, than Hobbes. He is not, for all that, the best.

[Burke] applied to the production of the sound political order what modern political economy had taught about the production of public prosperity: the common good is the product of activities which are not by themselves ordered toward the common good. Burke accepted the principle of modern political economy which is diametrically opposed to the classical principle: "the love of lucre," "this natural, this reasonable . . . principle," "is the grand cause of prosperity of all states." . . . [Burke's] intransigent opposition to the French Revolution must not blind us to the fact that, in opposing the French Revolution, he has recourse to the same fundamental principle which is at the bottom of the revolutionary theorems and which is alien to all earlier thought.

Strauss, 314-15 (quoting Burke). Burke, in Strauss's view, then is already infected with an incipient tendency toward "secularization" or "temporalization." Relative to Hobbes and to Rousseau, Burke is conservative. Relative to Aristotle, to Cicero, to Thomas Aquinas, to Suarez, to Richard Hooker, Burke is not. Burke has already swallowed the pill of modernism, of secularism.

(continued)
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*Terra australis means "southern land," and is a reference to the hypothesized continent in the southern hemisphere, also called terra australis incognita, or "unknown southern lands," in most maps between the 15th and 18th century based upon the unsupported speculations of Aristotle.
**Burke, however, "does not reject the view that all authority has its ultimate origin in the people or that the sovereign is ultimately the people . . . ." Strauss, 298. But Burke speaks less of "compacts" or "contracts," than he does of "constitutions," "custom," and "prescription."

Ecstasis and Telos: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Disfigured Man

"A LOVER OF HIS KIND, but a hater of his kindred," is how Edmund Burke aptly described Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). Rousseau abandoned as many as perhaps five children he fathered out of wedlock with the seamstress Thérèse Levasseur. But we mustn't forget that this noble act gave the responsible "citizen of Geneva" Jean Jacques Rousseau the time and the peace and quiet to write about so many things with great authority and aplomb, including morality, good citizenship, and (no kidding!) the proper rearing and education of children. Edmund Burke was right: Rousseau was worse than a bear, for a "bear, loves, licks and forms her young, but bears are not philosophers," at least not "philosophers of vanity." (Burke, Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, 1791). The remarkable thing is that men (particularly the French) listened to Rousseau, lionized him, and idolized this sensual and diminutive whining egoist to the point that Burke could mock the French as running to foundries with the kettles of their poor and the bells of their churches to have them smelted down into statues of Rousseau. Preposterously, the French even enshrined the ashes of this cad who wrote words sweet, but did things bitter, in the Panthéon in Paris.


In his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1754), the most famous of his political discourses, Rousseau resolves to discover the true nature of mankind by doing what Hobbes did, hypothesizing on man's "state of nature" or "original condition." Coming to the exact opposite of Hobbes's conclusions, however, Rousseau sees man in his "state of nature" not as a state of constant war, but a state of constant peace, a paradise. Rousseau comes to believe that culture and society have stained the warp and woof that is man, and that in his natural state man was far more pure and altruistic. Famously, Rousseau compares his analysis of man to the Greek statute of Glaucus:

Like the statue of Glaucus, which time, sea and storms had disfigured to such an extent that it look less like a god than a wild beast, the human soul altered in the midst of society by a thousand constantly recurring cause, by the acquisition of a multitude of bits of knowledge and of errors, by changes that too place in the constitution of bodies, by the constant impact of the passions, has, as it were, changed its appearance to the point of being nearly unrecognizable. And instead of a being active always by certain and invariable principles, instead of that heavenly and majestic simplicity whose mark its author had left on it, one no longer finds anything but the grotesque contrasts of passion which thinks it reasons and and understanding in as state of delirium.

Poor Rousseau. It was not mankind that was like Glaucus's statue. It was Rousseau that was like Glaucus's statue. It was Rousseau, whose egotistic and self-regarding sensualism and sexual license led him to his life of hideous selfishness, one which led him to abandon his children, marked him with a chronic inability to get along with any of his colleagues, and fed his palpable paranoia. By his behavior, he had disfigured himself, his soul, to where it had no semblance of its original nobility.

And that the grass, which methought hung so wide
And white, was but his thin discoloured hair,
And that the holes he vainly sought to hide,
Were or had been eyes:—
. . .
'First, who art thou?'—'Before thy memory,
'I feared, loved, hated, suffered, did and died,
And if the spark with which Heaven lit my spirit
Had been with purer nutriment supplied,
'Corruption would not now thus much inherit
Of what was once Rousseau,—

Shelley, "Triumph of Life" (1822).

As the poet Shelley put it, Rousseau had lost his eyes. Where there had once been eyes, there were but gaping holes, a man who had blinded himself. And why should we follow a blind guide, especially one self-blinded? Rousseau is called Father of the French Revolution, a revolution that during its Reign of Terror led to the death of perhaps as many as 40,000. If you include his five children (who very likely died in the foundling hospitals where they were abandoned) to the tally, that would be 40,005. These were but collateral damage to the theories of Rousseau.


Be all that as it may, Rousseau's efforts at unearthing human nature like some sort of philosophical paleontologist was not for the purpose of discovering an end or teleology in that nature. He rejected any notion of a teleology in nature, and saw that nature as "self-contained rather than ordered beyond itself." Levering, 109. Moreover, there is no notion in Rousseau wherein man finds fulfillment in community (as a political animal) or where he is "guided toward 'ecstatic' fulfilment by an ordering established by God." What Rousseau intended to do was discover this original nature so that it could be the foundation of the natural rights of the individual as against society. Thus, though Rousseau's conclusions about human nature are more optimistic than Hobbes's, they still suffer from the same individualistic strain.

The two fundamental principles of "natural law" that he finds [through his analysis] are self-preservation and compassion for others; the second principle will predominate and guide human society unless the first principle is threatened. What he calls "natural right" flows from these two principles.

Levering, 111-12.


Rousseau's conclusion was that man was radically free and equal in his original state. All goods, even women, were free and could be picked and chosen at will as if they were fruit on a tree. "Savage man is free of entangling social bonds, whether with neighbours, wife, or children, and therefore is free to seek peacefully his self-preservation and to exercise compassion." Levering, 114. It was only the invention of private property (and exclusive marriage, an invention of civilized women to control men) that led to man's fall from his idyllic savage existence.

The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had someone pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch . . . .

Levering, 114-15 (quoting Part II of Discourse on the Origin of Inequality).

The original sin was not disobedience to God, but the institution of private property, and following its institution, the natural law disappeared to be replaced by a regime of violence, or, only marginally better, human law, which was nothing less than violence writ on paper. Laws

gave new fetters to the weak and new forces to the rich, irretrievably destroyed natural liberty, established forever the law of property of inequality, changed adroit usurpation into an irrevocable right, and for the profit of a few ambitious men henceforth subject the entire human race to labor, servitude, and misery.

So, deftly, with his free, easy, and irresponsible pen (what did he care; it helped sell books), Rousseau managed to contradict Hobbes's view of the state of nature and the value of the commonwealth and Locke's veneration of the right to private property and contractual government. All ills were placed at the foot of civil society. As he famously wrote in the opening lines of the Social Contract: "Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains!"

It's true. Rousseau could write a line. But he could not live a life. And he could and would ruin many, and most certainly five. And whatever it was that he advanced, and for whatever it is that he is famous for, it is not because he advanced the cause of the natural moral law and the cause of virtue.