T11 Book Reviews 0

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soul. It does not matter whether this is the injustice of law or lawlessness, norm or exception, deed or omission. Beauty is found in equal measure in great artworks and great societies. Fairness is the intimation of good order in human conduct and aesthetic arrangement. Law, critique and beauty governed the Greek political mind. It is the latter clause (beauty) that is too often missing in the Atlantic democracies. Read de Tocqueville, where the word ‘beauty’ rarely occurs. Read Castoriadis, the great Modern Greek philosopher, and you will find that the word occurs often, and without embarrassment. However, even there, beauty rarely appears in close connection with Castoriadis’ central philosophical conception ‘autonomy’. That is a pity. For, if human autonomy is the product of the struggle between law and its exceptions, it is beauty that allows us to judge what exceptions count and what don’t. Beauty – with its harmonic and rhythmic proportions – guides us through the labyrinth of law and its exceptions. Beauty, or its absence, is a good guide to steer us clear of both the failures of law and the follies of Persianism. Beauty abides neither sterile law nor indulgent exception. Reviewed by Peter Murphy Victoria University of Wellington [email protected]

Michael Zank (ed.) Leo Strauss’ The Early Writings 1921–1932 (State University of New York, 2002) Leo Strauss matured in the new world. His early writings, however, are from the old Central European world of Germany. Strauss published his first book on Thomas Hobbes after writing it in England, and aged into public view as a Platonic political philosopher at the University of Chicago. We might imagine Strauss as the diminutive scribbler in a restricted physical interiority, roaming world history politically through philosophy with an extreme esoteric but nonetheless breathtaking scope, all the while transiting on a new world visa. His career as a political philosopher, however, began with a British book on Hobbes, written under the aegis of the Oxford don Ernest Barker. The centrepiece of his career, in my view, is Strauss’ Natural Right and History (1953). This book consisted of well-arranged and footnoted lectures on the origin and establishment of classical political philosophy as a doctrine of natural right and its successful modern revival. In it, Aristotle is a longish footnote to Plato, and the modern story of natural right is that of the brilliance of Hobbes, the necessary moderation of this philosophy by John Locke, the revolt against this moderation by J. J. Rousseau, with the political prudence of English orator and parliamentarian Edmund Burke acting as the fire brigade for the continental flames ignited by Rousseau.

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Strauss’ prudent story of the political thought of modernity kept our eyes for the most part averted from the 19th and 20th centuries. The good doctor prescribed doses of early modern social contract in liberal proportions, but much larger ones of classical political thinking. This gave him (and his followers) the reputation of being weird; like military historians in the US history profession, the ‘Straussians’ appear as an excluded clique in the liberal and ‘state/social constructionist’ dominated professional world of American political science. Most obsessive perhaps is Strauss’ insistence on taking Alfred Whitehead’s canard about Plato literally. Strauss, to repeat with emphasis, was the great Platonic political philosopher of his era. Though Strauss doesn’t make it into the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought (while George Lukács receives triple the words granted John Rawls), he is, along with that aforementioned Harvard liberal, and Hannah Arendt, one of the most influential political thinkers of the 20th century. Indeed, let us demote Isaiah Berlin, the mere intellectual essayist of historical figures, and settle on Arendt, Rawls and Strauss as the three stars. Of our three stars, of course, one (Arendt) is often called an ‘Aristotelian’ and is disputably of the left. Another is perhaps more indisputably of the right, and a self-styled Platonic. The third, Rawls, is the definitive liberal. Rawls lectured comfortably through the latter part of the 20th century; before this point he is as biographically as interesting as is his prose. Even he described his war service in the US infantry in New Guinea, the Philippines and Japan in 1943–45 as ‘singularly undistinguished’. Arendt and Strauss, however, had old world lives before becoming new world thinkers. As German Jews of intellectual promise, they both lived through the 20th century at its most radical. Imagine for a moment, a political and expressive but post-Raphaelite ‘School of (Rathenauian) Berlin’ in the style of Max Beckman’s triptychs. Would it not necessarily include the unholy trinity of 20th-century conservative German thinkers: Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt and Ernst Jünger? Perhaps Max Weber would be reclining alone on the floor, delirious but venerable and grand in his Wilhelmine officer’s uniform as the fresco’s ‘Michelangelo’. The other Kantian schoolmen might be found in a boring crowd scene, with a more interesting smaller crowd around Karl Barth, the Epicureans of the Vienna school out of the picture, and Walter Benjamin alone, sprawled in a morose and baroque position on the attic floorboards like ‘Diogenes’? Jünger would occupy some influential but drug-induced margin, and Heidegger (the magician of Messkirch) would have to be placed out of the centre, like ‘Socrates’, with a ‘Xenophon’ and ‘Alcibiades’-like figure about him. Would we not have to place that figure of 20th-century Roman jurisprudence, Schmitt, draped in a Jesuit black, diabolically near the PlatonicAristotelian centre? In such a picture, Strauss is likely to end up as a Spartanexiled ‘Xenophon’ next to – given enough poetic license – a Rommelesque ‘Alcibiades’. But this placement is problematic, since Strauss is perhaps the

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one really important thinker of the 20th century to be strongly influenced by Heidegger as well as by Schmitt. He might thus belong nearer the centre rather than an approximation of Raphael’s ‘Xenophon’. Certainly Strauss’ texts in the volume under review, all of which are political or political-philosophical, suggest something of the sort. Their central body contains a record of Strauss’ politicized old world existence as a Zionist – albeit packaged in several Alexandrine layers of protective intellectual historical notes, editorial introductory chapters and indexes, by an evidently able translator and religion professor at Boston University named Michael Zank. To an extent, they provide a rare image of an intelligent person thinking politically in Heideggerian vocabulary. Zank has meticulously marked this for even the most unobservant reader through bracketed insertions of the expression Dasein, as for example in the opposition of the expressions Galuth-Dasein and Staatsburger-Dasein. So far as their location within the German Zionist movement is concerned, Strauss’ political writings take up a national-conservative position against the Frankfurt left (Erich Fromm, Friz Gothein, Leo Lowenthal and Ernst Simon). But, as an ‘Ecclesia Militans’, they also oppose Jewish orthodoxy. To this end Strauss applies what Schmitt’s critics have called a ‘decisionist’ vocabulary that is unesoteric and even bare. He does this in support of a political outlook just this side of ‘blue-white’ Zionist fascism (as for instance on pp. 77 and 108ff). It is, Strauss writes in a 1926 screed against the Frankfurt mystic-humanitarian left of the Gustav-Landauerites and their ‘anarchy of standpoints and positions’, the ‘modern’ and not ‘the ancient sense’ of ‘the political’ that is ‘relevant to us’ (pp. 66, 65). Or, as he puts it elsewhere, we must understand the political standpoint of the Jews in Germany as not about springing tigers or any other kinds of ‘leaps’, but as ‘a playing off of power against power, as is the case in all politics’ (p. 129). Given that Strauss applied repeatedly for help from Schmitt, one might interpret his rejection of the post-Protestant world view of German nationalism such as that of Paul de Lagarde as part of an attempt to find a European respublica Christiania in the old world. Strauss’s view rejects the outlook that sprang from a Protestant-rooted German national militancy, and thus within a regime inspired by what Schmitt’s understanding of the Roman Church and its realms as a complexio oppositorum. The latter portion of Strauss’ early writings deal largely with Baruch Spinoza, and not with Zionism. They might be interpreted as the manner in which, via the philosophy of this classical Dutch republican, Strauss backed himself into the new world. (I say ‘backed’ because the further west Strauss moved geographically en route to Chicago, the further ‘behind’ Spinoza towards Athens he moved mentally.) This marks a move from a religiouscentred world view of cultural nations orbiting around the Catholic-imperial sort of German politique of the time to the universal doctrine of natural right – a slide from old world to new world. Or, as Zank succinctly puts it, Strauss

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turned ‘from practical involvement in a political movement to the theoretical examination of premodern political philosophy and its implications for modern man’ (p. 202). The centrepiece of the second portion of Strauss’s early work is a meticulous assessment of the manner in which neo-Kantian historicist critique (in the form of Hermann Cohen’s essay on Spinoza) obscured Spinoza’s political views, his critique of religion, and his philosophy. We can call Strauss a wise ‘civic republican’, if only on the basis of the brilliant title of his The City and Man (1964). For reasons of politique, Strauss never denied an allegiance to ‘democracy’ even if he may have suspected that the American variant of democracy had more to do with Woodrow Wilson’s religious convictions than any ancient understanding of constitutional excellence. Compared with the rambling national prejudices of English territoriality, Strauss came to the new world with some of the better aspects of the Germanic township in his Zionist satchel. His Spinoza counter-reading allows us to imagine the philosopher set among pretty Dutch towns and portrait paintings. The most politically influential of Strauss’ opponents from his Zionist period might be Erich Fromm, called by the editor a ‘psychologist and later Trotskyite’ (p. 9). Unlike the other members of the Frankfurt School, Fromm ably reached ‘behind’ academism to write To Have and to Be? (1976). This small book on political virtue was strikingly influential in the founding of the German green alternative movements and their party lists. If we think of ‘socialists’ and ‘socialism’ as tied etymologically to ‘baptists’ and ‘baptism’ (the first ‘ist’ movements), then perhaps we could say that Fromm moved ‘behind’ his ‘Trotskyite’ period to become a kindly new lefty Buddhistical civic democrat. In the Germany that Strauss left, though, postwar neo-Kantian critical thinking continued to corrode a proper, indeed any kind of, understanding of ‘pre-Kantian’ political and philosophical thinking, not to mention prudence. In result, we have ended up with a Federal Republic shorn of its Greek and Latin educational system and poorly equipped to grasp or relate to either new world military hegemony or its neoclassical foundations. Reviewed by John Ely Email: [email protected]

Christopher Houston, Islam, Kurds and the Nation-State (Berg, 2001) Christopher Houston’s book is that rare thing, a scholarly and sympathetic book about an Asian country that both opens a window onto the life of the country and subjects its culture and institutions to uncomforting critique. This book will reward the interest of readers curious about the nonmetropolitan outposts of the global political order. One reason for its