When Man Encounters Political Animals: A Straussian Critique of Objectivist Political Philosophy

When Man Encounters Political Animals: A Straussian Critique of Objectivist Political Philosophy

Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of the Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein Honors Program

Yeshiva College Yeshiva University Spring 2006

Tzvi Kahn Mentor: Professor Ruth A. Bevan, Political Science

INTRODUCTION GAZING OVER A BARREN, PRISTINE LANDSCAPE surrounded by mountains, divorced from the brutal forces of the socialist dystopia that seeks to crush his individuality and repress his intellect, Prometheus – the hero of Ayn Rand’s (1905-1982) novella Anthem – ponders with exhilaration his new life away from civilization. “This, my body and spirit, this is the end of the quest,” he says. “I wished to know the meaning of things. I am the meaning.” 1 The image of Prometheus standing alone in the wilderness constitutes an enduring symbol of Rand’s work. In this context, the pursuit of political excellence and universal goodness remains incidental to human virtue. Man lives for his own sake. The quest for happiness, for righteousness, for meaning, begins and ends not with the common good, but with the individual good. Rand’s decision to name Prometheus after Aeschylus’s ill-fated hero amounts to a particularly apt expression of her story’s central theme. The classical Prometheus’s disobedience of the gods corresponds to Rand’s contention that neither religion nor tradition – let alone the state – can function as a standard of morality. Only an individual’s happiness, which man advances through reason, may serve as a bellwether of virtue. For Rand, Greek authors such as Aeschylus and Aristotle provide the first moral worldview that grounds itself not in institutions or authority, but in an individual’s untrammeled use of his cognitive faculty. 2 Thus, to develop the philosophy she calls Objectivism, Rand seeks to explore the thought of classical Athens, the originator and incubator of the philosophic enterprise. The philosophy of ancient Greece paves the groundwork not only for Rand’s worldview, but also for the thought of Leo Strauss (1899-1973), a contemporary of Rand 1

Ayn Rand, Anthem (New York: Signet, 1961), 94. See Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual (New York: Signet, 1961), 22-23; Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels (New York: Meridian, 1982), 30-31.

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who sees the classics as the architects of the concept of natural right, which in modern times finds its most eloquent expression in the Declaration of Independence. While neither Strauss nor Rand exhibits any awareness of each other’s thought in their voluminous writings, their respective approaches to classical philosophy, modern philosophy, and ethics bear striking resemblances. Both believe that modern philosophy, by rejecting reason as a definitive means of approaching reality, has gone tragically astray. Both advocate revisiting the classics to rediscover concepts like virtue, truth, morality, objectivity, and the good. Both ground their worldviews in the belief that objective morality remains a distinct possibility, that reason even in the absence of God can lead to truth grounded in natural law. And both cite authorities like Aristotle in their efforts to explicate a philosophical system that rejects the fact-value distinction postulated by modern thinkers like Weber and Heidegger. Yet even as Rand and Strauss appeal to identical sources in the formulation of their respective philosophies, their specific conceptions of truth and natural law stand at starkly dissimilar poles. Both, in all likelihood, would have strenuously rejected each other’s worldview. Still, while scholars have yet to advance significant comparative analyses of Rand and Strauss, the striking overlaps in their ideological paradigms demand a more indepth study of their approaches to political philosophy. Indeed, the bitter controversy and recriminations that often surround even a casual reference to Strauss and Rand in public life have inhibited a balanced and dispassionate examination of their thought. 3 This essay aims to

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Some hysterical treatments of Rand and Strauss that focus more on their personalities and their followers than on their philosophies include Shadia B. Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999); Ann Norton, Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); James S. Valliant, The Passion of Ayn Rand’s Critics (New York: Durban House, 2005); and Jeff Walker, The Ayn Rand Cult (Peru, Ill.: Open Court Publishing Company, 1998). The LaRouche movement, for its part, has dubbed Leo Strauss an enemy of America who actively sought to destroy the country and achieve world domination. See Jeffrey Steinberg, “Profile: Leo Strauss, Fascist Godfather of the Neo-Cons,” in Executive Intelligence Review, 21 March 2003, .

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explore the differences between the respective philosophies of Leo Strauss and Ayn Rand, with a particular focus on their application to the relationship between the individual and the state. In this respect, I seek not to mount a comprehensive investigation of their oeuvres, but rather to consider their writings with regard to several political-philosophical questions that lie at the heart of their worldviews and of classical political philosophy. What role does the concept of natural right play in political governance? How should we define morality and virtue in politics? Is it possible to reconcile the tension between the individual and the state? In addressing the approaches of Rand and Strauss to these problems, I intend to advance a critique of Rand’s position on the basis of Strauss’s views. By demonstrating that Strauss employs a more accurate and comprehensive use of classical thinkers than Rand does, I seek to uncover the flaws in Rand’s perception of human nature, the state, and natural right, and to show why her political philosophy remains inconsistent with the classical sources she quotes selectively to justify it.

I

THE FOUNTAINHEAD, THE NOVEL THAT LAUNCHES Ayn Rand’s literary career, begins with an image of quintessentially adulatory human idealism. Howard Roark, the hero, stands naked upon a cliff, laughing, gazing at the lake below him and considering his future with immeasurable and immutable confidence. The scene evokes an image of a Greek god or warrior standing in the agora, his muscles bulging, his skin perfectly tanned and well-oiled, projecting unmitigated self-assurance, power, and control. All other men appear weak and inadequate in his presence. In this respect, Roark typifies the Randian hero. Like John Galt in

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Atlas Shrugged and Kira Argounova in We the Living, Roark not only is physically handsome and emotionally intrepid, but also embraces a philosophy of individualism that glorifies productive achievement, hard work, and intellectual prowess. He measures another man’s worth on the basis of the man’s ability to offer him something of value. He lives for no one’s sake but his own and refuses to compromise his principles. He rejects religion because he cannot accept the possibility that man lies subservient to anyone or anything. 4 He is selfish, but not gluttonous or hedonistic; he simply pursues his own happiness singlemindedly and without any concern for others. The Fountainhead, first published in 1943, traces Roark’s efforts to advance a maverick career in architecture as he faces an endless wave of narrow-minded competitors who shun innovation and promote unthinking conformity. Along the way, he encounters a series of scoundrels, socialists, and what Rand calls “second-handers” 5 – people who appropriate the original ideas of others and claim them as their own, people who measure the value of an idea on the basis of the number of people who endorse it, people who lack the ability to exercise critical and innovative thinking in the face of opposition from their colleagues and the public. Such characters include, among others, Ellsworth M. Toohey, whose ostensible concern for the weak and unfortunate masks a sinister desire for absolute power, and Peter Keating, an architect who launches a distinguished but ultimately ephemeral architectural career by relentlessly exploiting the mercurial shifts of public opinion and embezzling the ideas of his associates. In the novel’s denouement, Roark agrees to design a building for Keating and to let him take the credit for it so long as Keating in no way modifies the original plans. When Keating caves to public pressure to alter the designs,

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See Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (New York: Plume, 1994), 39. See especially ibid., 710-717.

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Roark dynamites the building, leading to an acrimonious but ultimately triumphant trial that prompts Roark to enunciate an impassioned defense of his life’s work and philosophy. In his speech to the jury, Roark speaks of Prometheus, who, like Roark, suffers because he pursues forbidden knowledge. “Thousands of years ago,” Roark says, “the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burned at the stake he had taught his brothers to light.” 6 The theme of unapologetic individualism finds more elaborate expression in Rand’s fourth and most famous novel, Atlas Shrugged. This prolix work, first published in 1957, records the efforts of the railroad company Taggart Transcontinental to survive as it faces the rise of a repressive socialist government in America, which gradually seizes control over the nation’s resources and crushes any attempts at individual productivity and growth. The government’s policies spur a group of brilliant industrialists, artists, and intellectuals, led by the dynamic John Galt and ultimately joined by Dagny Taggart, the vice president of Taggart Transcontinental and later Galt’s lover, to launch a strike by withdrawing from society and depriving the world of their talents. Their absence, combined with the self-destructive socialist ethos of the American government and culture, causes the economic and political collapse of the United States, and prompts the elite’s realization of its deleterious ways, paving the way for Galt’s return and a renaissance of capitalism and productivity. Once again, Rand’s central themes of individualism, of the necessity of the intellect to sustain human life, of the power of capitalism to promote productivity, of the evils of altruism and collectivism, of the intellectual bankruptcy of any form of religion or mysticism, remain predominant. Rand cultivated her worldview during her childhood in Soviet Russia, which permanently concretized her deep-rooted opposition to any collectivist form of government. 6

Ibid., 710.

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She dramatizes her experiences there in her semi-autobiographical and lesser-known first novel, We the Living (1936), which describes the efforts of Kira Argounova to earn a degree in engineering as she struggles to support herself and her family under the iron grip of Soviet dictatorship. Yet throughout her tribulations Kira maintains a passionate, unrelenting love of life and a deep-rooted conviction that joy and happiness constitute normative elements of human existence. According to Barbara Branden, a friend and biographer of Rand, “[Rand] believed that pain and frustration and suffering were meaningless aberrations, never a normal part of life, never to be accepted as the inevitable nature of human existence – and never to be considered important.” 7 Nonetheless, happiness, in Rand’s view, can only be defined in terms of the individual. The notion of collective happiness is meaningless, since a collective consists of nothing more than numerous individuals. 8 This view explains in part the origins of Rand’s atheism. While Rand does propose arguments against the existence of God from an epistemological and ontological standpoint, 9 a key factor that lies behind Rand’s rejection of God resides in her discomfort with the notion that man lacks complete control over his faculties. Rand’s heroes reject God because they consider man a god. Consider the following conversation between Kira Argounova and Andrei Taganov in We the Living: “Do you believe in God, Andrei?” “No.” 7

Barbara Branden, The Passion of Ayn Rand (New York: Anchor Books, 1986), 8. “The avowed mystics held the arbitrary, unaccountable ‘will of God’ as the standard of the good and as the validation of their ethics. The neomystics replaced it with ‘the good of society,’ thus collapsing into the circularity of a definition such as ‘the standard of the good is that which is good for society.’ This meant, in logic – and, today, in worldwide practice – that ‘society’ stands above any principle of ethics, since it is the source, standard, and criterion of ethics, since ‘the good’ is whatever it wills, whatever it happens to assert as its own welfare and pleasure. This meant that ‘society’ may do anything it pleases, since ‘the good’ is whatever it chooses to do because it chooses to do it. And – since there is no such entity as ‘society,’ since society is only a number of individual men – this meant that some men (the majority or any gang that claims to be its spokesman) are ethically entitled to pursue any whims (or any atrocities) they desire to pursue, while other men are ethically obliged to spend their lives in the service of that gang’s desires.” Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness (New York: Signet, 1964), 15. The emphasis is Rand’s. 9 See Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (New York: Meridian 1991), 21-23. 8

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“Neither do I. But that’s a favorite question of mine. An upside-down question, you know.” “What do you mean?” “Well, if I asked people whether they believed in life, they’d never understand what I meant. It’s a bad question. It can mean so much that it really means nothing. So I ask them if they believe in God. And if they say they do – then, I know they don’t believe in life.” “Why?” “Because, you see, God – whatever anyone chooses to call God – is one’s highest conception of the highest possible. And whoever places his highest conception above his own possibility thinks very little of himself and his life. It’s a rare gift, you know, to feel reverence for your own life and to want the best, the greatest, the highest possible, here, now, for your very own. To imagine a heaven and then not to dream of it, but to demand it.” 10 The Soviet regime replaces God with a mercurial, amorphous collective. The collective, in its view, is divine. Rand, however, believes that man need only look at one concrete and definitive place to find the “highest possible”: himself. For Rand, the individual constitutes the sole standard of morality. Concomitantly, she posits, morality itself amounts to an objective concept, grounded in the facts of reality and dependent on man’s ability to cognize the physical universe and derive values from it. As Rand explains, “The primacy of existence (of reality) is the axiom that existence exists, i.e., that the universe exists independent of consciousness (of any consciousness), that things are what they are, that they possess a specific nature, an identity.” 11 Man cannot change the facts of reality – “A is A.” 12 In this context, the existence of existence, as Rand might say, precludes the existence of God or anything that lies outside of man’s sense capacities. Accordingly, the only tool man possesses to approach reality is reason, or thinking, which forces him to stare reality in the face without fear and to draw the necessary conclusions, 10

Ayn Rand, We the Living (New York: Signet, 1964), 117. Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It (New York: Signet, 1982), 24. The emphasis is Rand’s. 12 Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (New York: Plume, 1999), 1016. 11

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including the inevitable recognition that man must work to live and that obtaining sustenance and riches requires the exercise of the intellect. Money emerges when man produces something of value, i.e., something that advances his life and his happiness. In this respect, says Rand, in a striking reversal of the popular adage, money amounts to the source and product of all good, not evil. 13 Man’s ability to produce reflects man’s ability to innovate, to use his intellect, to exist. And living – and the potential for happiness and greatness that it entails – is coeval with the beginning and the end of the advancement of morality. Rand sees death and suffering as anomalies, as deviations from the natural order. She recognizes their inevitability, but not their significance. To promote the good – that is, to live a moral life – man must engage in productive achievement that demonstrates intellectual acuity and respect for individual human life and happiness. Thus, in Rand’s novels, the heroes invariably devote their lives to enterprises that reflect man’s mastery of nature: Kira Argounova aspires to be an engineer, Howard Roark constructs buildings, and Dagny Taggart operates railroads. Although their efforts produce benefits for the collective population, they act entirely selfishly. They work not to help others, but for the happiness it brings themselves, for the personal, egotistical satisfaction derived from a job well done. They recognize that their work brings enormous advantages to other people, but they consider such advantages incidental. In this sense, Rand suggests, the natural order of reality dictates that man can rely only on himself for life and happiness. The notion that helping others constitutes the highest good invariably leads, in her view, to the evil of Soviet Russia, which considers social responsibility such an overarching value that it views individual human beings as essentially worthless. According to Rand, government’s primary role lies in self-defense and the protection of individual rights, not the “common 13

See ibid., 410-415.

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good.” 14 Adopting a fundamentally libertarian outlook in practice if not in principle, 15 she opposes taxation and virtually all government welfare programs, including the funding of public schools. Altruism and charity invariably lead to the lowering of standards of excellence and to the execrable belief that man is inherently incapable of helping himself. Altruism promotes over-reliance on others, stymies innovation and free-thinking, and implies that man lacks omnipotence over the world, that the universe is not inherently benevolent, and that man is a weak and pitiful creature. In the political sphere, says Rand, only laissezfaire capitalism provides the freedom man needs to exercise his rational mind and produce. 16 Capitalism corresponds with man’s essential nature, which requires him to use his intellect to generate the means of his own survival. Free trade, in fact, constitutes the “practical expression” of reason, Rand writes. 17 Capitalism “is the only system that functions in a way which rewards rationality and penalizes all forms of irrationality.” 18 Rand’s passionate endorsement of laissez-faire capitalism spurs her enthusiasm for its foremost practitioner: the United States of America. Part of her fervor undoubtedly stems from the refuge America provided her from the hell of her childhood in the Soviet Union. Still, she also harbors a deep, almost rapturous reverence for America’s founders and the revolutionary form of government they devised. Rand believes that the principles of individual liberty and freedom of expression outlined in the Constitution and the Declaration 14

“If one begins by defining the good of individual men, one will accept as proper only a society in which that good is achieved and achievable. But if one begins by accepting ‘the common good’ as an axiom and regarding individual good as its possible but not necessary consequence (not necessary in any particular case), one ends up with such a gruesome absurdity as Soviet Russia, a country professedly dedicated to ‘the common good,’ where, with the exception of a miniscule clique of rulers, the entire population has existed in subhuman misery for over two generations.” Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: Signet, 1967), 21. See also Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness, 125-134. 15 Despite her enormous influence on libertarian philosophy, Rand vociferously opposed the Libertarian Party. See Peter Schwartz, “Libertarianism: The Perversion of Liberty,” in The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought, ed. Leonard Peikoff (New York: Meridian, 1989), 311-333. 16 See Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 11-34. 17 Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual, 13. 18 Ayn Rand, Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (New York: Meridian, 1999), 182.

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of Independence denote the closest (if still imperfect) actualization of rationality, reason, and objectivity. Specifically, she notes, America’s founders regarded man’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as self-evident, objective values derived through reason from the facts of reality: The founding fathers were neither passive, deathworshipping mystics nor mindless, power-seeking looters; as a political group, they were a phenomenon unprecedented in history: they were thinkers who were also men of action. They had rejected the soul-body dichotomy, with its two corollaries: the impotence of man’s mind and the damnation of this earth; they had rejected the doctrine of suffering as man’s metaphysical fate, they proclaimed man’s right to the pursuit of happiness and were determined to establish on earth the conditions required for man’s proper existence, by the “unaided” power of the intellect. 19 Rand considers the promotion of individualism insufficient if it lacks a foundation in objective, immutable principles. This conviction explains her vociferous opposition to libertarianism, which in her view promotes liberty without values. Even though the Libertarian Party’s platform in practice resembles her own view of government’s proper role, she rejects it in toto because she remains convinced that a policy based on subjective whims is doomed to failure. 20 Both actions and intentions are equally important. Correspondingly, Rand’s epistemology lies inextricably intertwined with her ethics. Reason naturally leads to capitalism, because reason dictates that an individual is primary, and only capitalism permits an individual to flourish. Startlingly, Rand even suggests that Aristotle, insofar as his epistemology makes America’s ethics possible, “was the philosophical father of the Constitution of the United States and thus of capitalism.” 21

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Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual, 25. The emphasis is Rand’s. See Schwartz, “Libertarianism: The Perversion of Reason” in The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought. 21 Ayn Rand, “Review of Randall’s Aristotle,” in The Voice of Reason, 12. 20

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Without the discoveries of dialectical reasoning and of the eternality of the physical world championed by Aristotle, man cannot recognize that individualism constitutes the natural, most pure state of humanity. For this reason, Rand vociferously rejects any efforts by philosophers to challenge Aristotle’s epistemology and the supremacy of rationality. In particular, Rand reserves distinct scorn for modern philosophy, which in her view promotes nihilism, hopelessness, and futility. She rebuffs – but does not epistemologically refute – any effort to demonstrate that life lacks purpose, that misery defines life’s essence, and that happiness remains a distant fantasy. Leonard Peikoff, a protégé of Rand whose book The Ominous Parallels received her enthusiastic endorsement, argues that the thought of Kant and Hegel prefigures the wars and political upheavals of the twentieth century due to its emphasis on the incapacity of the human mind to fully cognize physical reality. Man, in Kant’s view, inevitably distorts the nature of his surroundings as a result of his subjective perceptions and his limited knowledge of the universe. Thus, he must rely on alternative sources – faith in God and submission to social institutions – to attain a definitive account of nature’s disposition and man’s role within it. “I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith,” says Kant. 22 Similarly, according to Hegel, physical reality amounts to an absolute oneness, which consists of dialectical units of affirmation and negation that lie subordinate to and yet comprise the greater whole. Man, in this framework, amounts to a subsidiary of reality’s collective unity and must devote himself to fulfilling the will of the group or of society. To define the collective good, we look to history, whose vicissitudes and turmoil encompass the infinite multitude of human actions and their manifestations in political life, providing us

22

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s, 1956), 29. Cited in Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels, 33.

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with a source of moral instruction that allows us to determine the parameters of good and evil. Peikoff and Rand consider Hegel’s views morally indistinguishable from Kant’s because both Hegel and Kant feel compelled to derogate man’s ability to perceive the world accurately and devise a moral worldview on that basis alone. Man’s confidence in the efficacy of his own physical cognition, according to Rand and Peikoff, preconditions his awareness of good and evil, because only through his untrammeled ability to apprehend concrete reality can man reach the logical conclusion that an individual human being constitutes an existential primary. Once man surrenders his trust in his own cognitive abilities, he must perforce turn elsewhere – such as religion or the state, both of which are above men and hence more reliable as an arbiter of morality. 23 By asserting the primacy of the individual in determining good and evil, Rand concomitantly asserts the primacy of the individual in the governance of a state. A government policy that grounds itself in individual rights will inevitably produce the common good, even if the common good is not the government’s intention. 24 An emphasis upon individualism in all walks of social and cultural life encourages productivity and thereby reduces the need for government welfare in the first place. If a government assumes the role of primary provider for individuals living under its aegis, citizens will have no incentive to think, work, and create a productive society that eliminates the very need for

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See Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels, 34-41, 117-118. “When ‘the common good’ of a society is regarded as something apart from and superior to the individual good of its members, it means that the good of some men takes precedence over the good of others, with those others consigned to the status of sacrificial animals. It is tacitly assumed, in such cases, that ‘the common good’ means ‘the good of the majority’ as against the minority of the individual. Observe the significant fact that that assumption is tacit: even the most collectivized mentalities seem to sense the impossibility of justifying it morally. But ‘the good of the majority,’ too, is only a pretense and a delusion: since, in fact, the violation of an individual’s rights means the abrogation of all rights, it delivers the helpless majority into the power of any gang that proclaims itself to be ‘the voice of society’ and proceeds to rule by means of physical force, until deposed by another gang employing the same means.” Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: Signet, 1967), 21. The emphasis is Rand’s. 24

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government assistance, and hence avoids the recrudescence of the problem that necessitated the welfare state at the start. Accordingly, a government policy is good only if it reduces the role of government. In this respect, Rand’s perspective on the morality of government is notable for its striking repudiation of the role of the political in human affairs. Since government’s primary purpose lies in the defense of the people that support it, government becomes useful and virtuous not for its inherent capability to benefit others, but for its superior ability to avert external threats. Government constitutes a concession to necessity, a result of the apprehension that only armies can defeat other armies, that the act of collectivization intrinsic to building a military amounts to the only instance that requires, both morally and practically, the reliance on a collective. Army service – i.e., the act of risking an individual’s life to defeat a foreign enemy – is virtuous when the army is defending the moral value of freedom, individualism, happiness, and productivity. Since the United States stands for these values, Rand views the American military with unreserved admiration, praising its cadets as seminal embodiments of the nation’s highest values, as individuals who live their lives with a distinct sense of moral purpose. A “selfish” man, in the Randian sense, can still morally serve in the army, because selfishness entails not hedonism, but a refusal to compromise a person’s values and happiness. To fight – even to die – for such principles constitutes a beautiful expression of man’s capacity for greatness. 25 Rand frequently points to Aristotle’s epistemology and his rejection of Plato’s belief in forms as decisive moments in the history of philosophy – moments, indeed, which provide

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Rand’s speech to the graduating class of the United States Military Academy at West Point on March 6, 1974, eloquently articulates her view on the morality of military service. See Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It (New York: Signet, 1984), 1-11.

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the ideological framework that made America’s birth possible. 26 A society based on Aristotelian principles, in her view, “would be a country where the rules were objective, firm and clear, where you could use the power of your mind to its fullest extent, on any scale you wished, where you could gain rewards for your achievements, and men who chose to be irrational would not have the power to stop you nor to harm anyone but themselves.” 27 Yet in this respect Rand refers not to Aristotle’s Politics and Nicomachean Ethics, which provides guidelines for an ideal society and for an ideal individual, but to Aristotle’s works on logic. 28 This emphasis finds its most eloquent expression at the end of Atlas Shrugged, when Ragnar Danneskjöld, peacefully reclining on a couch after the successful conclusion of John Galt and his protégés’ battle against America’s socialist dictatorship, reads a passage from Aristotle: …for these truths hold good for everything that is, and not for some special genus apart from others. And all men use them, because they are true of being qua being…. For a principle which everyone must have who understands anything that is, is not a hypothesis…. Evidently then such a principle is the most certain of all; which principle this is, let us proceed to say. It is, that the same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject in every respect…. 29 According to Rand, the substance of this quotation, an elementary pillar of Aristotelian logic, naturally underlies her view of the inextricable connection between reason and individualism, a view which millennia of religious mysticism and socialist ideology had sought to obscure. If man frees himself from the shackles of religion and socialism, he will logically and invariably arrive at the ideologies of America’s founding fathers, of John Locke, and of Ayn

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See, e.g., Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 11, 138, 315; Philosophy: Who Needs It, 7, 57, 63, 210; The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought, 6-12; For the New Intellectual, 22-23. 27 Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It, 57. 28 “…so long as a single automobile, a single skyscraper or a single copy of Aristotle’s Logic remains in existence, nobody will be able to arouse men’s hopes, eagerness and joyous enthusiasm by telling them to ditch their mind and rely on mystic faith.” Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It, 63. 29 Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1167. The uncited quotation from Aristotle appears in his Metaphysics 1005a2225, 1005b14-15, 17-20.

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Rand herself, who all share a common belief in man’s cognitive abilities and in his capacity to achieve productivity and happiness on this earth. However, this premise finds its most cogent challenge in the works of Leo Strauss, who believes that Aristotelian and classical views of reason and individualism lead to strikingly different conclusions. Strauss by no means considers himself a socialist, but he approaches the tension between individualism and statism with a starkly different set of presuppositions and ideological paradigms. His study of the classics endows theories of natural right and their classical adherents with a depth and legitimacy they rarely had before, supplying an original contextual prototype for understanding the state that constitutes a devastating refutation both of Rand’s notions of individualism and of the socialism she so vociferously criticizes.

II

“IT IS SAFER TO TRY TO understand the low in the light of the high than the high in the light of the low,” writes Leo Strauss. “In doing the latter one necessarily distorts the high, whereas in doing the former one does not deprive the low of the freedom to reveal itself fully as what it is.” 30 This statement, notes the scholar Harry V. Jaffa, encompasses the “thrust and purpose of Strauss’s work,” 31 which aims to reintroduce the tradition of classical political philosophy to a discipline permeated by relativism and grounded in Weber’s categorical distinction between facts and values. Unlike modern political philosophy, the classical conception of philosophy bases itself in eternal and immutable values that seek to ascend 30

Leo Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1965), 2. Harry V. Jaffa, “Leo Strauss, the Bible, and Political Philosophy,” The Claremont Institute, 13 Feb 1998, . 31

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“from what is first for us to what is first by nature,” 32 to emerge from Plato’s cave into the resplendent light of self-knowledge. “Philosophy,” writes Strauss, “is quest for wisdom or quest for knowledge regarding the most important, the highest, or the most comprehensive things; such knowledge, [Plato] suggested, is virtue and is happiness.” 33 The human experience embodies the act of striving, of exertion, of ascent toward greater truth. The life of the philosopher, according to Strauss, entails the unremitting attempt to identify the One with the Whole – to attach significance to the individual in the context of the collective. In the Socratic sense, the philosopher par excellence knows that he knows nothing, 34 because he recognizes that man, qua individual, remains physically incapable of comprehending the origins and totality of existence. In this respect, man’s existential bearing parallels his political bearing. Just as man, a contemplative, reasonable being, seeks virtue within the totality of earthly life, man also, as a political animal, 35 seeks virtue within the totality of the city. Politics, in turn, according to Aristotle, constitutes the “master art” of man because it encompasses all other arts. 36 “The state,” Aristotle observes, “is by nature clearly prior to the family and to the individual, since the whole is of necessity prior to the part.” 37 The state marks a natural a priori, a categorical imperative that reflects the elemental fabric of the human condition. However, if the individual lies subordinate to the city, a fundamental paradox emerges. Virtue, as both Aristotle and Plato stress, presupposes self-knowledge. Knowledge, in turn, presupposes the existence of an individual mind that contains it. As Ayn Rand observes, while the members

32

Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 240. Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1968), 6. 34 Cf. Plato, Apology of Socrates 23b. 35 Aristotle, Politics 1253a, 1278b. 36 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1094b. 37 Aristotle, Politics, 1253a. 33

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of a group or of a city can know the same things, we cannot speak of a city or a group per se that “knows”; only an individual man or woman can exercise the cognitive faculty that makes knowledge possible. Yet the city, in the classical view, seems to trump the individual. “And he who by nature and not by mere accident,” Aristotle declares, “is without a state, is either a bad man or above humanity.” 38 How, then, can the classics link virtue with self-knowledge if the state, which cannot as such achieve self-knowledge, represents the highest manifestation of the good? In effect, are not the classics espousing socialism? Must we accept the verdict of the philosopher Karl Popper that the classical emphasis on statism prefigured the Soviet Union and Nazism? 39 To comprehend Strauss’s approach to the putative tension between individualism and collectivism among the classics, we must understand what Strauss considered the two greatest challenges to classical political philosophy – biblical revelation and modern political philosophy – and how the classics navigate the seas between them. Strauss does not consider the two equal challengers – he rejects modern political philosophy outright and respects the intellectual integrity and possibility of biblical revelation. Put differently, Strauss believes that biblical revelation confronts classical political philosophy from above and modern political philosophy confronts it from below. Though it differs from classical political philosophy in several important respects, biblical revelation remains consistent with the classical aspiration for the good. The Bible harbors no inhibitions about making value judgments, promising agonizing punishments if man fails to comply with the divine will. It exhorts man to strive for self-improvement, to conquer the world, to subdue it. God creates man in the divine image, not vice versa. By contrast, modern political philosophy, founded

38 39

Ibid. See Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962).

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by Machiavelli, lowers the threshold of man’s aspirations in consonance with man’s baser instincts. Following Weber, it ejects value judgments from politics, endorsing a supposedly objective and scientific approach to the study of the city and man. In this context, classical political philosophy inhabits a middle ground between biblical revelation and modern political philosophy. Biblical revelation requires man to take a leap of faith, to trust that the biblical text stems from a nonphysical, supernal source. Modern political philosophy, in turn, mandates man’s surrender to the vicissitudes of suffering and conflict, teaching that any effort to counter life’s travails will ultimately prove futile. Man can mitigate his suffering, but he will never eliminate it. Classical political philosophy encourages man to ascend to the highest plains of virtue and justice by using reason and only reason, not the revealed will of a certain god or gods. Strictly speaking, it seems that biblical revelation and philosophy stand at mutually exclusive ideological poles. Aristotle, after all, rejects the concept of a biblical god who creates the world ex nihilo, performs miracles, and legislates the parameters of man’s conduct. Philosophy presumes that man possesses the ability to obtain knowledge of the whole via the untrammeled use of reason. Indeed, a sentence like the opening phrase of the Bible, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” remains foreign to the classics. Aristotle’s cosmology leaves no room for the “beginning” of creation, which suggests the existence of an omnipotent and omniscient rational actor who designs the world in accordance with a specific plan. 40 Similarly, while the cosmology of Plato’s Timaeus suggests a beginning of the universe, the Platonic God nonetheless subordinates itself to the world’s spatio-temporal origins. “The Platonic God,” notes Strauss, “is a creation also of

40

See Aristotle, Metaphysics 1071b-1075a.

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Gods, of visible living beings, i.e., of the stars; the created gods rather than the creator God create the mortal living beings and in particular man; heaven is a blessed god.” 41 By contrast, the belief in biblical revelation – that is, the belief in miracles – entails the deliberate suspension of reason. It suggests that man can never achieve knowledge of the whole, because there exists another being, God, who always knows more. Belief in god requires faith because reason can neither prove nor disprove the possibility of biblical revelation. “If it is true then that human reason cannot prove the nonexistence of God as an omnipotent being,” writes Strauss, “it is, I believe, equally true that human reason cannot establish the existence of God as an omnipotent being.” 42 Consequently, without engaging in a leap of faith, contemporary readers of the Bible cannot understand it the way the rabbis of the Talmud understood it. Instead, historical and critical study of the Bible emerges as the new method of interpretation, which reached its apex with the publication of Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise. Spinoza can describe the Bible as a reflection of ancient myths and superstitions because he cannot entertain the possibility of miracles, the key ingredient that comprises the ideological foundation of revelation. The distinctiveness of biblical revelation finds further expression in the apparent absence of the Greek term physis (φύσις), or nature, in the Bible. As Strauss notes, the classical recognition of physis constitutes a prerequisite for the pursuit of philosophy. If, after all, philosophy “is the quest for principles, meaning – and let us be quite literal – for the beginnings, for the first things,” 43 and if the “beginnings” do not stem from a god or gods, then only physis can amount to the primary source of investigation for the study of first 41

Leo Strauss, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, ed. Kenneth Hart Green (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 397. 42 Leo Strauss, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, 361. 43 Leo Strauss, The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, ed. Thomas L. Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 253.

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things. Thus, when Socrates applies the concept of physis to the study of the city and man, political philosophy is born. Political philosophy is not a biblical concept, because for Strauss Judaism’s core derives from a belief in supernatural revelation. 44 According to the Bible, we cannot speak of God apart from nature because God is the source of nature. Therefore, as a result of their contrasting ideological premises, biblical revelation and classical political philosophy cannot disprove one another. As such, says Strauss, “every one of us can be and ought to be either one or the other, the philosopher open to the challenge of theology or the theologian open to the challenge of philosophy.” 45 Even though one person cannot be both, a theologian and a philosopher can derive a certain inner strength and integrity by recognizing the insoluble challenge posed by the other. Strauss’s view of the dichotomy of theology and philosophy spurs him to advocate a return to the medieval rationalism of Maimonides. Strauss’s enthusiasm stems in large part from Maimonides’s distinctive perspective of the relationship between philosophy and law, between reason and revelation. Strictly speaking, the inherent act of divine commandment seems to necessitate man’s obedience irrespective of his ability to understand the reasoning behind the commandment. Yet Maimonides affirms the value and necessity of philosophy and of reason within the context of understanding the law. “Philosophy,” Strauss explains, owes its authorization, its freedom to the law; its freedom depends upon its bondage.” 46 The Bible, in other words, provides the context that makes reason both desirable and indispensable:

44

See Steven B. Smith, “Leo Strauss: Between Athens and Jerusalem,” The Review of Politics 53, no. 1 (1991): 80. 45 Leo Strauss, The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, 270. 46 Leo Strauss, Philosophy and Law, trans. Eve Adler (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 88. The emphasis is Strauss’s.

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The Torah, like the world, is a work of infinite wisdom and grace and thus is knowable to the finite intellect only to a small extent; the Torah itself is a world, in which man lives, to the understanding of which he should apply himself according to his powers, but which always contains more of wisdom and goodness than man can observe. Hence the Torah is – not somehow a limit on inquiry, for inquiry encounters no limit in discovering the wisdom and grace it contains, but – a guideline for inquiry. The Torah – like the world, as a “world” – is prior to philosophy. 47 By endorsing the life of contemplation within the context of revelation, the Bible as interpreted by Maimonides bears a striking similarity to the life of theory espoused by the classics. 48 Both champion the pursuit of philosophizing, of self-knowledge and knowledge of the whole, of ascent. The difference between them lies simply in the framework within which the philosophic enterprise takes place. Strauss’s appeal to the Maimonidean approach to reason and revelation reflects his profound respect for both pursuits. In this sense, Steven B. Smith aptly describes Strauss as standing “between Athens and Jerusalem.” 49 Indeed, Strauss views the tension between reason and revelation as the twin sources of Western civilization – it comprises “the core, the nerve, of Western intellectual history, Western spiritual history.” 50 This tension manifests itself in the Declaration of Independence, which subtly refers both to natural right (“We hold these truths to be self-evident”) and to God (“that [all men] are endowed by their Creator”). Strauss begins his landmark study Natural Right and History with a quotation of this passage from the Declaration, which in his view exemplifies the apotheosis of contemporary government as well as the ideal standard that brings into focus the chasm between modern

47

Ibid., 100. The emphasis, again, is Strauss’s. See ibid., 103-105. 49 Smith, “Leo Strauss: Between Athens and Jerusalem,” 75. 50 Leo Strauss, The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, 270. 48

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and classical political philosophy. Natural right, according to Strauss, constitutes an indispensable element of civilized society; its absence inevitably leads to nihilism.51 Paradoxically, Strauss simultaneously observes that the origin of natural right seems to stem directly from a blunt challenge of divine law. Before Socrates, early Greek philosophers typically either attribute their views to divine inspiration or claim that the gods sanction them. Presocratic writers like Homer, Hesiod, and Parmenides appeal to the gods and muses as sources of wisdom, linking the validity of their views with the inherent authority derived from divine beings. 52 Thus, before Plato, philosophy and authority remain inseparable. To philosophize means to ask what the gods think. Consequently, like the biblical God, the human worshippers of the Greek gods lack awareness of physis, of nature, because they implicitly assume that the gods produce nature. The discovery of natural right occurs only when the philosophers begin to challenge the gods, to demand a reasoned explanation of divine dictates. As Strauss observes, in Plato’s Republic, Socrates and his cohorts can only discuss natural right when the elderly Cephalus, the father and head of the household as well as the representative of the early Greek belief in divine authority, has left to sacrifice to the gods. The “absence of Cephalus, or of what he stands for, is indispensable for the quest for natural right,” Strauss writes. 53 Ostensibly, then, the discovery of natural right implies the necessity of directly confronting divine authority. Strauss, however, emphatically rejects this possibility. Rather, he argues, the key to understanding the relationship between natural right and divine authority lies in recognizing that they constitute two utterly distinctive enterprises that man can only pursue independently of each other. The attempt to combine natural right with 51

Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950), 5. See Jonathan Barnes, Early Greek Philosophy (New York: Penguin, 2001), 3-8, 77-91. 53 Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, 84. 52

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divine authority invariably dilutes the integrity of both. Of course, we can, like Maimonides, employ reason within the context of revelation, but that should not obscure the inimitability of each pursuit. After all, Strauss notes, “if man knows by divine revelation what the right path is, he does not have to discover that path by his unassisted efforts.” 54 As such, Strauss reacts with alarm at the concerted attack on natural right waged by modern political philosophy, which attempts to undermine it through two distinct but related schools of thought: historicism and the fact-value distinction. Historicism surfaces in the nineteenth century in the context of the French Revolution, which sought to overthrow the traditional emphasis on eternal and divine values that enabled generations of oppressive rulers to terrorize their subjects. At its core, the historical school tries to demonstrate that the “local and the temporal have a higher value than the universal.” 55 Rather than look toward a single value system that emerged in a specific time and place, the historicists believe that the totality of historical circumstances can provide a superlative framework for the ideal society. In essence, says Strauss, the historical school “can be reduced to the assertion that natural right is impossible because philosophy in the full sense of the term is impossible.” 56 But values, according to Strauss and the classics, by definition must transcend history. The philosophical search for the whole presupposes that the whole reflects a universal ontology that cannot change as a result of the exceptional vicissitudes of a specific time and place. On a deeper level, notes Strauss, the historical argument relies on a premise that can only lead to its self- abrogation: if all values merely reflect the historical vagaries of a specific time and place, then the historical school must subject its own contentions to the objective, scientific

54

Ibid., 85. Ibid., 15. 56 Ibid., 35. 55

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lens of history. Accordingly, the historicists’ arguments then become as tenuous as the values they purport to debunk. “For to say in the same breath,” Strauss argues, that our sole protection against war between societies and within society is reason, and that according to reason “those individuals and societies who find it congenial to their systems of values to oppress and subjugate others” are as right as those who love peace and justice, means to appeal to reason in the very act of destroying reason. 57 This argument bears a striking parallel to Strauss’s previous contention with respect to Maimonides that the freedom of philosophy “depends upon its bondage.” To maintain its integrity and vitality, reason cannot subscribe to any theory that negates its essence. Reason derives its potency from its ability to evaluate, and embrace or reject, certain values. To paraphrase Maimonides, the historicist flaw lies in its failure to distinguish between “true and false” and “good and evil.” 58 If reason limits itself to evaluating truth and falsehood while ignoring good and evil, then ultimately it cannot definitively know either. Reason “depends upon its bondage” to the determination of good and evil; its rejection of this responsibility invariably leads to “complete chaos.” 59 The historicist school does not present the only challenge to natural right. In modern times, Weber’s attempt to formulate a purely objective social science also seeks to discard the traditional distinction between facts and values, arguing that the Is and the Ought stand in insoluble discord. The Ought is unknowable because man is finite and the world is infinite. Hence, human reason is impotent. In large part, according to Strauss, this view reflects Weber’s belief that conflict constitutes the only element of the human condition that remains

57

Leo Strauss, The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, 12. See Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 23-26. 59 Leo Strauss, The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, 12. 58

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permanent. For Weber, “peace is phony, but war is real.” 60 Thus, according to Weber, since life consists solely of conflict, and since the perpetuation of conflict makes it futile and irrelevant to determine the Ought, the distinction between facts and values is hollow. 61 This pessimistic view, however, does not originate with Weber. In fact, Strauss argues that Weber’s views reflect the premises of the founder of modern political philosophy, Niccolo Machiavelli, whose thought comprises the first of three waves of modernity that continue with Rousseau and Nietzsche. 62 Machiavelli postulates that political philosophy should seek to accomplish the objectives that really matter to societies – freedom, prosperity, and stability – and not hackneyed and unrealistic goals like the attainment of justice and virtue. In other words, notes Strauss, for Machiavelli, “Virtue is nothing but civic virtue, patriotism or devotion to collective selfishness.” 63 Morality and virtue define themselves solely in terms of immorality and greed. The good constitutes merely the absence of evil. Man must lower his standards if he wishes to achieve a stable social order. Simply put, “traditional political philosophy aimed too high.” 64 Machiavelli’s pessimistic view of human nature continues with Hobbes, but with some key differences. The distinctions are apparent in the titles of their key works: Machiavelli writes a book entitled On the Prince; Hobbes writes a book entitled On the Citizen. Hobbes accepts the central premises of Machiavelli but changes their context. Hobbes makes Machiavelli’s teaching more acceptable because, whereas Machiavelli focuses on the vanity of a single ruler, Hobbes teaches that such vanity amounts to the intrinsic

60

Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, 65. See ibid., 63-69. 62 Leo Strauss, An Introduction to Political Philosophy, ed. Hilail Gildin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 81-98. 63 Leo Strauss, What is Political Philosophy? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 42. 64 Ibid., 48. 61

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nature of the masses. All men, not simply politicians, aspire to control one another. Man by nature seeks to compete with and surpass other men. In this respect, man’s appetites fundamentally correspond to the appetites of animals and consequently we cannot morally blame him for what he naturally covets. 65 The only difference between men and animals lies in man’s desire for honor, for glory. To check this appetite, man requires an omnipotent state, a Leviathan, to contain it. The stability achieved by such a state, according to Hobbes, constitutes justice. Unlike Machiavelli, Hobbes actually concerns himself with justice, if an uninspiring version of it. 66 Nevertheless, Hobbes’s attempt to justify Machiavelli’s teaching by applying it to the masses cannot mitigate the opposition to philosophy that lies at its core. Yet the views of Hobbes share at least one common denominator with classical political philosophy that highlights and accentuates their differences. In certain respects, Hobbes justifies his worldview by appealing to rationalism. In other words, whereas biblical revelation looks above the world and the classics look at the world’s totality in light of the Ought, Hobbes simply looks at the world in light of the Is and then stops looking. 67 From Hobbes’s perspective, this approach is eminently reasonable because it evaluates physical reality in terms of probabilities. In this sense, Hobbes makes precisely the same error that the historicists make and that Maimonides implicitly criticizes: detaching reason from values. By considering man’s potentialities in light of humanity’s lowest common denominator, Hobbes veers sharply from the classical conception of philosophy. Indeed, strictly speaking, from the perspective of the classics, it would be fair to say that Hobbes is not even a philosopher at all. 65

Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, trans. Elsa M. Sinclair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 11-14. 66 Leo Strauss, What is Political Philosophy?, 46-48. 67 In a different context, Strauss similarly articulates a core difference between the classics and the moderns. Classical political philosophy “differs radically from a typically modern conclusion according to which the unavailability of knowledge of the whole demands that the question regarding the whole be abandoned and replaced by questions of another kind, for instance by the questions characteristic of modern natural and social science.” Leo Strauss, The City and Man, 20-21.

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But perhaps the greatest challenge to traditional political philosophy springs from Heidegger, whom Strauss considers, according to Thomas L. Pangle, a leading expositor of Strauss’s thought, “the thinker of our age.” 68 According to Strauss, Heidegger’s thought stems from the existentialist school of philosophy, which begins “with the realization that as the ground of all objective, rational knowledge we discover an abyss. All truth, all meaning, is seen in the last analysis to have no support except man’s freedom.” 69 This leads Heidegger to repose the central question that occupies Plato and Aristotle and that absorbs the bulk of his own philosophic career: “What is Being? What is that by virtue of which any being is said to be?”70 For Heidegger, the most intriguing classical answer to this question comes from Presocratic thinkers like Parmenides, who posits the oneness of existence and the impossibility of conceptualizing nonexistence. Like Parmenides, Heidegger seeks to dig beyond the typical views of physicality and motion that typically comprise our definitions of existence. Instead, he wishes to understand the core meaning of Existenz, of being, of “existence out of itself.” 71 In approaching this monumental and rather abstract task, says Strauss, Heidegger essentially seeks to flee from nature into a supposedly authentic form of being, which Heidegger calls Dasein. Accordingly, Heidegger represents the most radical expression of modernity, a logical if remote outgrowth of the challenge against the classics initiated by Machiavelli and Hobbes. As the scholar Neil Robertson explains, Instead of the self-interpreting exister, Strauss points to the human being engaged in and structured by civic life, standards, laws. He sees that the crisis of modernity is not centrally at the level of meaning or significance for the individual exister, but about our capacity to engage in a moral and political life that 68

Thomas L. Pangle, “Introduction,” in Leo Strauss, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, ed. Thomas L. Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 25. The emphasis is Pangle’s. 69 Leo Strauss, The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, 36. 70 Ibid., 37. 71 Ibid., 38.

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connects citizens to a structure of human excellence. The “originary” encounter is, for Strauss, not for the human as dasein, but for the human as citizen, as a certain “type” structured by a shared moral and political life. To recover this form of the “originary,” one turns not to the poetic musings of pre-Socratic poets and philosophers, but to the dialectical rationalism of the dialogues of Plato. 72 Ironically, though, while Strauss rejects the extreme modernism of Heidegger, Strauss recognizes that Heidegger, though an atheist, in some respects champions a semi-biblical conception of humanity that views man as created in the image of God. Like some motifs of the Bible, Strauss observes, Heidegger “interprets human life in the light of ‘being towards death,’ ‘anguish,’ ‘conscience,’ and ‘guilt.’” 73 Similarly, by attempting to define esse in terms of non esse, Heidegger unwittingly mirrors the biblical conception of creation ex nihilo, which emphasizes the link between existence and God’s will, between existence and the nothingness that comes before it. Paradoxically, Heidegger attempts to position himself so far away from the classical model that he almost returns to the biblical view of man. “Esse, as Heidegger understands it,” writes Strauss, “may be described crudely, superficially, and even misleadingly (but not altogether misleadingly) by saying that it is a synthesis of Platonic ideas and the Biblical God: it is as impersonal as the Platonic ideas and as elusive as the Biblical God.” 74 Seeking to define existence by rejecting all its previous conceptions and stepping, as it were, outside its physical parameters, Heidegger inadvertently revisits the original premise of biblical creationism that he rebuffs at the outset, implicitly rendering his own theory unintelligible and incoherent. By divorcing his philosophy from the physical and the temporal while rejecting the divine and the eternal, Heidegger has no place left to turn. In his bold attempt to deconstruct and thereby explain existence, Heidegger 72

Neil Robertson, “Leo Strauss’s Platonism,” Animus 4 (1999), . Leo Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 12. 74 Leo Strauss, The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, 46. 73

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unwittingly reveals the futility of the enterprise, unintentionally granting more legitimacy to the very theories he aims to disprove. After rejecting, like Ayn Rand, the amorphously inscrutable theories of Heidegger and the cynically pessimistic premises of Machiavelli and Hobbes, Strauss turns, like Ayn Rand, to the classics, which celebrate reason and the power of man’s rational faculties. Yet the lessons Strauss draws from classical thinkers – from Aristotle, Plato, Thucydides and others – leads him to strikingly disparate conclusions regarding the tension between, and the nature of, the individual and the state.

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Like Ayn Rand and unlike modern political philosophy, the classics maintain a firm belief in the ability of reason to derive values, discover the natural order of humanity and the universe, and devise a moral course of life that corresponds to the objective state of reality. On this basis, says Strauss, popular consensus traditionally considers Socrates the founder of political science: …according to Cicero, Socrates was the first to call philosophy down from heaven, to establish it in the cities, to introduce it also into the households, and to compel it to inquire about men’s life and manners as well as about the good and bad things. In other words, Socrates was the first philosopher who concerned himself chiefly or exclusively, not with the heavenly or divine things, but with the human things. 75 Put differently, if the laws of a human polity stem from God, then philosophy as a discipline proves superfluous – a law is just because God has enacted it and not because it corresponds to nature. By removing the question of justice’s meaning from the realm of the divine, the 75

Leo Strauss, The City and Man, 13.

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common wisdom goes, Socrates enables man to contemplate the parameters of virtue, both political and individual, from the perspective of physical reality and humanity’s perception of it. In so doing, Socrates founds political philosophy. Yet Strauss observes, à la Ayn Rand, that such a conclusion raises the objection that justice and virtue find their foremost expression in an individual; to speak of a just city presents the obvious paradox that a city consists merely of numerous individuals. 76 Strauss attempts to resolve this quandary by pointing to Aristotle’s claim that man is a political animal and hence political associations emerge by nature. In this context, says Strauss, “The highest good of the city is the same as the highest good of the individual.” 77 Ostensibly, this thesis hardly seems to resolve the problem – how can Aristotle compare individual virtue with political virtue? After all, Aristotle as well as Plato assert that contemplation, which leads to knowledge of the whole, supplies the highest good for man, yet contemplation by definition constitutes an individual act. Strauss explains that the solution becomes plainer when we properly understand the nature and role both of the city and of contemplation. According to Aristotle, says Strauss, political life proves inhospitable for a philosopher, because the pandemonium of politics inhibits the philosopher’s ability to engage in contemplation. Ironically, therefore, a political philosopher must separate himself from politics if he seeks to philosophize about the city – understanding the whole necessarily requires the ability to observe the whole externally. At the same time, the central feature of political life lies in the enforcement of laws, yet “law owes its strength, i.e.[,] its power of being obeyed, as Aristotle says here, entirely to custom

76

“…if there are to be things which are by nature just there must be things which are by nature common; but the body appears to be by nature each one’s own or private.” Ibid., 16. 77 Ibid., 31.

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and custom comes into being only through a long time.” 78 Individual citizens may appreciate the reason behind the laws, but the city as a whole must obey them regardless of their agreement with – or understanding of – their rationale as derived from contemplation. Reason or ideology seldom constitutes a sufficient impetus for human action in the political arena. Indeed, Strauss acknowledges, “the city actually dedicated to human excellence is, to say the least, very rare.” 79 Ostensibly, citizens enact laws because they remain concerned that their absence will cause the city to lapse into corruption and violence. In other words, the laws aim not to facilitate directly the life of contemplation, but to create an environment for individuals to behave as they please without fearing other individuals; they may refrain from contemplating human excellence if they so choose. In this sense, the city seeks not to promote the good, but to prevent the bad. The laws function aside from, and not because of, the good. The philosopher, therefore, must stand apart from the politician and the politician must stand apart from the philosopher. Socrates meets a grim fate precisely because he violates this unspoken boundary and challenges his fellow citizens to explain the underlying moral reasons for their behavior. This perception of the state seems to resemble the modern conception of statehood advocated by thinkers like Hobbes and even Rousseau. Yet Aristotle sees this role of the state merely as the precondition for its formation, not its defining characteristic. Men, in the classical view, gravitate toward the city instinctively – not, as Rousseau postulates, to ratify a social contract that ensures their mutual protection. Moreover, cities do not emerge because nature compels numerous men to share single pieces of land and hence to build one – a city, after all, differs significantly from other human associations such as households, towns and

78 79

Ibid., 22. Ibid., 41-42.

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states. Men, presumably, can live without cities. Nonetheless, men build cities because they seek on some level to discover the whole. Aristotle, in Strauss’s view, is the founder of political science because he identifies this distinguishing feature of the city. The city, unlike other human associations, represents the greatest manifestation of human excellence, encompassing the totality of human life in its myriad social, political and cultural contexts. It allows man to discover nature from outside of itself, to step beyond the limited confines of his social circle, which by definition is restricted, and witness the whole from an external vantage point: The city is by nature, i.e.[,] the city is natural to man; in founding cities men only execute what their nature inclines them to do. Men are by nature inclined to the city because they are by nature inclined to happiness, to living together in a manner which satisfies the needs of their nature in proportion to the natural rank of these needs; the city, one is tempted to say, is the only association which is capable of being dedicated to the life of excellence. 80 To say, then, that man is a political animal implies not simply that man requires – on a social and psychological level – the presence of others to live. Rather, it also means that man cannot discover human excellence unless he observes human excellence in others. An individual man embodies only one component of nature. Witnessing multiple men and their interaction with each other and with the world as they all pursue excellence – i.e., residing in a city – allows an individual to observe a microcosmic version of the whole and hence to achieve virtue on a grand scale. Counterintuitively, the city promotes virtue not in itself, but through the philosopher’s ability to transcend the city. The city exists so that man can achieve virtue beyond the confines of its political structure. Thus, it becomes perfectly reasonable to accept “the principle that the highest end of man, happiness, is the same for the individual and the 80

Ibid., 41.

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city.” 81 The city amounts to a laboratory that encourages men to experiment with the good. Some experiments will succeed and some experiments will fail, but man will invariably emerge more knowledgeable and more virtuous from the experience. Contemplation may remain an individual act, but the individual requires the collective to advance it. Put differently, the city supplies the epistemological framework that makes the ethical framework possible. For precisely this reason, Aristotle begins the Nicomachean Ethics – a work that deals primarily with virtue on an individual level, unlike the broader societal focus of the Politics – with a brief definition and discussion of political science, which he calls “the highest of all goods achievable by action.” 82 Aristotle chooses his words carefully. Contemplation, the highest good of an individual, remains impossible without the highest good accomplished by society, i.e., the highest political good, which by definition emerges through action. Action and contemplation are inseparable, both from each other and from virtue. The city enables man to “fulfill his potential for happiness understood as the life of action in accordance with virtue; and because the city is essential to the fulfillment of man’s natural potential, the city is preeminently natural.” 83 Plato, according to Strauss, shares a similar perspective. Peikoff and Rand’s understanding of Plato corresponds to the traditional view, articulated most memorably by Karl Popper, that Plato seeks to establish a draconian socialist government that deems every citizen the property of the state. Yet according to a strikingly original reading of Plato’s Republic and Laws by Strauss, the aim of Socrates lies not in enunciating a particular

81

Ibid., 49. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1094b. 83 Carnes Lord, “Aristotle,” in History of Political Philosophy, ed. Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 137. 82

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political platform, but in demonstrating the contours and limits of political philosophy and the state. 84 A literal reading of Plato overlooks the irony that pervades the commentary of Socrates in the Republic, which “does not bring to light the best possible regime but rather the nature of political things – the nature of the city.” In so doing, Socrates demonstrates the city’s inability to fulfill man’s highest needs, which requires him to transcend the city rather than aspire to create its best possible version. “By letting us see that the city constructed in accordance with this requirement is not possible,” Strauss argues, Plato “lets us see the essential limits, the nature, of the city.” 85 By reviewing every social, cultural, political and economic facet of the city in the context of achieving the best possible regime, Plato reveals the impossibility – even the absurdity – of the endeavor. In this respect, Plato merely echoes Aristotle – the true founder of classical political philosophy – in emphasizing the dichotomy of individual contemplation and political virtue. Rand’s attempt to separate Aristotle’s politics from his epistemology thus reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of Aristotle’s conception of the state. Aristotle sees the state not as inherently good, as Rand understands him, but as a prerequisite to achieving the individual, contemplative good. In this respect, Aristotle’s contention that someone “who by nature and not by mere accident is without a state, is either a bad man or above humanity” 86 implies not that the state is superior to the individual, but that a man who fails – “by nature,” i.e., by his own volition, and not “by mere accident” – to belong to a state cannot ultimately amount to a virtuous human being and hence “is either a bad man or above humanity.” The classical understanding of the individual and the state thus considers the two of them

84

See Leo Strauss, The City and Man, 50-138, and The Argument and the Action of Plato’s Laws (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1975). 85 Leo Strauss, The City and Man, 138. 86 Aristotle, Politics, 1253a.

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mutually reinforcing, not mutually exclusive. At the same time, it concomitantly suggests that a man who resides outside the city dooms himself to a life of immorality and villainy only if he abjures the city voluntarily. Aristotle recognizes that not all men are born in a city and not all men will ever encounter one. Such individuals can still achieve virtue through knowledge of the whole as they perceive it. Only a man who consciously and deliberately disinclines himself to urbanity is “a bad man or above humanity,” because he has surrendered the opportunity for virtue on the grandest of scales. Correspondingly, as men independently seek the virtue that the city endows, classical thinkers oblige them to achieve a harmonious balance between individualism and collectivism, shunning temptations to bestow either of them with unchecked levels of force. Indeed, because the state and man find themselves equally malleable to the same corruptive enticements of power, Strauss sees the United States, with its three branches of government and elaborate system of checks and balances, as a superlative model of statehood in the modern world. Like Ayn Rand, Strauss admires America’s astonishing technological advancements, abundant productivity, and affluent quality of life, which man has achieved through his mastery and conquest of nature. 87 Like Ayn Rand, Strauss detests the grotesque malformations of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, both of which esteem the state at the expense of the individual. 88 Unlike Ayn Rand, however, Strauss considers individuals valuable not due to their productivity and reason, or what Rand considers virtue, but due to

87

“For Strauss understood the modern West to be constituted by a specific purpose or project: the construction of a universal society of free and equal nations of free and equal men and women enjoying universal affluence, and therefore universal justice and happiness, through science understood as the conquest of nature in the service of human power.” Nathan Tarcov and Thomas L. Pangle, “Leo Strauss and the History of Political Philosophy,” in History of Political Philosophy, 908. 88 See Leo Strauss, The City and Man, 2-3.

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their ability to achieve excellence through contemplation of the whole – a task that the city facilitates. In this context, Strauss is neither an individualist nor a collectivist in the modern sense of the terms. Whether he would have supported any of the functionally libertarian policies espoused by Rand remains an open question. Indeed, the policy implications of Strauss’s writings remain amorphous – a prospect that Strauss himself anticipates and in no way seeks to dispel. 89 Strauss seeks not to spell out a specific policy platform for adoption by a political party, but to supply an ideological framework for understanding the origins of modern political philosophy and how it has affected the current geo-political environment. By explicating the premises and aims of classical political philosophy, Strauss aspires to provide a point of departure for rediscovering the founding principles of the West and for reclaiming its will to justify its existence – both to itself and to its enemies. 90 In light of the concerted ongoing attack against Western principles launched by modern political philosophers like Heidegger, Weber, Machiavelli and Hobbes, Strauss hopes to reinvigorate his readers’ confidence in the essential justness of the Western cause and in its ability to achieve a virtuous society grounded in objective truth and natural law – a feat first attained by the classics. By elucidating the classics as a median plane between the pessimism and cynicism of modern political philosophy and the supernal absolutism of biblical revelation, Strauss demonstrates that man can pursue and implement a lofty and exalted code of morality

89

“We cannot reasonably expect that a fresh understanding of classical political philosophy will supply us with recipes for today’s use. For the relative success of modern political philosophy has brought into being a kind of society wholly unknown to the classics, a kind of society to which the classics are not immediately applicable. Only we living today can possibly find a solution to the problems of today.” Ibid., 11. 90 “…an adequate understanding of the principles as elaborated by the classics may be the indispensable starting point for an adequate analysis, to be achieved by us, of present-day society in its peculiar character, and for the wise application, to be achieved by us, of these principles to our tasks.” Ibid., 11.

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and conduct that stays firmly grounded in reason. Man can look above without necessarily looking at God. In her own writings, Rand also characterizes her moral vision in terms of reason, goodness, virtue and truth. Like Strauss, she rejects modern political philosophy as debasing, cynical, and inhuman. Nevertheless, while the moral vision she espouses contains elements of classical and Lockean political thought and purports to stand within the Western tradition, her philosophy ultimately stands primarily within the very framework of modern political philosophy she so vociferously deplores. Such a conclusion makes itself inevitable in light of Rand’s rejection of the classical emphasis on contemplation of the whole and her concomitant, if implicit, acceptance of modern political philosophy’s central thesis: that all men concern themselves, chiefly if not exclusively, with their own self-perpetuation. Rand, of course, describes her philosophy more flatteringly, claiming to advocate a worldview that glorifies productive achievement and the individual happiness it presumably brings. Yet in the absence of an appreciation for the individual’s pursuit of excellence through contemplation of the whole, Rand’s philosophy ultimately relies solely on the satisfaction of particular instincts and the application of human strength over nature. To put it bluntly, Randian heroes do little more than build and die. They build to demonstrate their intellectual acuity, their lust for life, and their ability to bring order to a complex set of physical variables. Ultimately, though, the terminus of her heroes’ behavior remains the same: themselves. They seek knowledge not because they consider knowledge inherently valuable but because knowledge enables them to produce. They reject the Socratic maxim that a truly wise man knows that he knows nothing, because Randian heroes feel certain that they can learn later anything they do not know now. Like John Galt and Howard

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Roark, they always remain true to their values, they always observe and analyze the universe, and they always devise complex intellectual paradigms to govern their behavior in accordance with their principles. Then, of course, they always – eventually – perish. The most widely voiced critiques of Rand usually focus on her failure to recognize man’s inherent sociability and need for companionship. Yet this assessment constitutes a symptom of her erroneous thinking rather than its core infection, which relates to far more elemental political and philosophical issues. The classics maintain a remarkable appreciation – independent of religion – of the sublime in nature and the transformative power of human knowledge. Plato and Aristotle devote so much energy attempting to explicating the good because they recognize that the good remains extraordinarily elusive. Indeed, if man can so easily discover and apply the good in his daily life, the efforts of the classics would be superfluous. The cave analogy in Plato’s Republic reflects the author’s recognition of the mystery of existence, of the vastness and incomprehensibility of the totality of nature. Its tantalizing inscrutability amplifies its value. By recognizing his ignorance in this context, man stays in a permanent state of ascent, always exploring, always scrutinizing, and always gaining as much knowledge as possible. The eternality of the endeavor ensures man’s continued occupation with it. By contrast, Rand essentially is an obscurantist. Her conception of sublimity and transcendence lies exclusively in man’s ability to conquer nature through his intellect. Knowledge, in her mind, is useless if it cannot lead to productivity. Yet since she considers the universe susceptible to comprehensive examination, the productive endeavor must by definition end at some place or at some time. If man is capable of omniscience, then at a certain point man must fully conquer nature. Dagny Taggart’s railroads can travel only so

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many routes; Howard Roark can build only a certain number of skyscrapers. By divorcing productivity from awareness of the whole, the Randian hero ends up living – in perhaps the greatest irony of all – for the sake of others. Dagny Taggart cannot construct her railroads unless other individuals choose to pay her for riding on them. To coin a phrase derived from Strauss’s discussion of Maimonides, the producer’s freedom to build depends upon his bondage to the consumer. A finite universe by definition is a circular one. Just as Heidegger tries so hard to transcend Being that he ultimately returns to it, Rand divorces individualism from the collective with such uncompromising starkness that her heroes must ultimately return to other individuals to implement their vision. John Galt’s radio address at the climax of Atlas Shrugged illustrates his dependency on other individuals. Try as he may to live a selfish life, he must still rescue others – the whole world, in fact – to sustain his life of individualism. Rand’s ignorance of the whole inadvertently places her squarely in the modernist tradition pioneered by Machiavelli, Hobbes, Weber, and Hegel. Like them, she lacks the humility and grandeur of classical political philosophy, which sees the infinite potential of nature and takes delight in contemplating as many facets of it as possible within man’s limited existential timeframe. By contrast, Rand’s heroes live for no purpose other than sustaining – and, in accordance with their intellectual abilities, improving – the conditions of their own survival. Once John Galt has devised his alternative source of energy, his life bears no discernable purpose beyond – perhaps – making an even more remarkable scientific discovery. The roots of Rand’s philosophy correspond to the modern inclination for perceiving reality through mathematical paradigms, which, as Thomas L. Pangle notes, “is unavoidably

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reductionist.” 91 As Strauss observes, in the mathematical framework, “In order to understand a whole, one must analyze or resolve it into its elements, one must study the elements by themselves, and then one must reconstruct the whole or recompose it by starting from the elements.” 92 Rand, however, erroneously assumes that we can seamlessly apply such a framework to the human condition, which remains subject to an infinite number of external stimuli that render the prospect of predicting human behavior difficult if not impossible. To concede this point is not to deny science or knowledge but to explain it. Human nature comprises part of the whole, but it also transcends the whole. Rand’s unwillingness or inability to acknowledge man’s innate complexity, compounded by her unflinching certitude in man’s potential to fully understand and conquer nature, leaves her unable to appreciate the classical understanding of contemplative virtue stemming from an awareness of the whole. A lack of conviction in the moral order of the universe, in her view, itself reflects moral weakness and cowardice. 93 By effectively deifying man, Rand’s philosophy becomes necessarily utopian. If man can gain complete knowledge of the whole, nothing can prevent him from executing a perfect political order. Man should seek not to transcend the city, but to implement the perfect city. Strauss, on the other hand, recognizes that the conflict between philosophy and the city makes the quest for a universal utopia naïve. Rand’s utopia must fail for the same reason that attempts by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to create a utopia failed – i.e., they misunderstood the applicability of the particular to the general. Knowledge of the whole

91

Thomas L. Pangle, Leo Strauss: An Introduction to His Thought and Intellectual Legacy (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2006), 93. 92 Leo Strauss, The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, p. 4. Cited in Pangle, Leo Strauss: An Introduction to His Thought and Intellectual Legacy, 93. 93 “‘Nobody can be certain of anything’ is a rationalization for a feeling of envy and hatred toward those who are certain.” Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It, 18. The emphasis is Rand’s.

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leads to the recognition of the permanent and of the transitory in the universe and hence enables man to determine the limits of the possible. Even if every human being on earth reads and accepts the premises of Atlas Shrugged, a perfect Objectivist society would not emerge because individuals – i.e., philosophers – by nature will always clash with society. “For Strauss,” write Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth, “the conflict between philosophy and society is inevitable because society rests in shared beliefs, and philosophy questions every trust and authority.” Philosophy is a “quest,” not “wisdom simply.” 94 The philosopher, says Strauss, must, like Socrates, “go out to the market place; the conflict with the political men cannot be avoided.” 95 Rand’s heroes, by contrast, do not ask questions; they lecture. They have already achieved wisdom, not embarked on the quest for wisdom. John Galt addresses the country in Atlas Shrugged’s climactic radio address not by answering questions from a radio host, but by unilaterally dominating the airwaves for several hours. Galt seeks to replace collectivist power with individualist power. Paradoxically, his one-sided speech reflects an implicit need for the very collectivist recognition he so stridently denounces. At no point does Galt ever explain why he cannot simply live out his life undisturbed in Galt’s Gulch, the miniature individualist society he established in an isolated valley. In essence, Galt’s goal remains the same as the socialists: acceptance by and domination over the majority in consonance with his own distinct moral vision. Strauss’s emphasis on the quest for wisdom rather than wisdom itself reflects a wish neither to mitigate the necessity of acting in accordance with certain value judgments nor to

94

Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth, “Introduction,” in Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), xi. 95 Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, 195.

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weaken politicians with crises of doubt and hesitation. 96 It also in no way seeks to grant legitimacy to the medieval Christian view of man as inherently sinful and pathetic. Skepticism and humility do not imply indecision and asceticism. An objectively virtuous city remains possible despite the difficulties of implementing and confirming its virtuous character. Man can and must strive for the best, even if he harbors no certainty that he has achieved it or ever will achieve it. Unlike Rand and Christianity, though, Strauss believes that the pursuit of the best regime sharply differs from the pursuit of a utopia. The pursuit of good always entails an encounter with evil. In this context, Strauss’s appeal to Aristotelian moderation remains particularly apt. According to Strauss, the failures of thinkers who exceed the bounds of moderation – e.g., “Karl Marx, the father of communism, and Friedrich Nietzsche, the stepgrandfather of fascism” – lead to the conclusion “that wisdom cannot be separated from moderation” and “that wisdom requires unhesitating loyalty to a decent constitution and even the cause of constitutionalism. Moderation will protect us against the twin dangers of visionary expectations from politics and unmanly contempt for politics.” 97 Yet moderation is superfluous – if not immoral – for the man who maintains absolute certitude in his philosophical convictions. Indeed, Rand explicitly rejects moderation – she calls it “the cult of moral grayness” 98 – as a sign of weakness and moral confusion. 99 Barry Goldwater’s famous citation of Cicero regarding the parameters of moderation and

96

Some of Strauss’s more intemperate critics have leveled the preposterous allegation that Strauss’s stress upon philosophic skepticism reflects an underlying nihilism that seeks to impose the savage tyrannical rule of philosopher-elites who lust for nothing but power. See, e.g., Nicholas Xenos, “Leo Strauss and the Rhetoric of the War on Terror,” in Logos 3.2 (2004); Shadia Drury, “The Making of a Straussian,” in The Philosopher’s Magazine (1st Quarter 2004): 24-25. 97 Leo Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern, 24. To the extent that Strauss ever articulates a practical political position directly relevant to modern American politics, this statement comes closest to it. 98 Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness, 87. 99 See ibid., 87-92.

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extremism in the pursuit of liberty and justice is as foreign to Strauss as it is instinctive to Rand. By rejecting the possibility of inscrutable complexity in nature and the need for moderation that it logically entails, Objectivism ultimately rests upon an exceedingly fragile political scaffold that presumes normative human omniscience and omnipotence. Strauss, by contrast, accepts the implicit preferability of constitutional democracy, but insists upon its susceptibility to philosophical questioning. “We are not permitted to be flatterers of democracy precisely because we are friends and allies of democracy,” Strauss contends. 100 The true philosopher must always seek greater understanding and must therefore probe everything, even his most cherished principles. Since Rand, however, remains unrestrained by doubts, she plunges on to her promised land, eager to expand Galt’s Gulch to include the rest of the world and to canonize Atlas Shrugged as man’s new Bible. Yet such a scenario can occur only if the present political order is expunged. Hence, John Galt, rather than attempting to save the world, withdraws from it until it implodes so that he can seize power himself. He relies on the destruction of others in order to advance his individualist dream, bearing nothing but contempt for the men he will ultimately rely upon to fuel his livelihood. Classical political philosophy, in its emphasis on knowledge of the lofty, transcendent whole, relies on the individual’s autonomous utilization of his intellect to achieve virtue even if nobody else wishes to follow in his footsteps. Classical man seeks no apocalyptic cataclysms to usher in a new world order. Unlike John Galt, he is comfortable with the world in its present arrangement even as he seeks to improve it however he can. He pursues companionship and virtue in the context of the city, not for the city’s inherent merits, but for the city’s inherent potential to surpass them for the sake of achieving the highest possible 100

Leo Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern, 24.

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good. In this respect, ironically, Leo Strauss and the classics rather than Ayn Rand and her followers are the true individualists. In its emphasis on productivity and individual responsibility, Rand’s vision of human life is inspiring, even admirable. By encouraging her readers to cultivate their intellect in the pursuit of scientific greatness rather than surrender to existential despair, she has inspired readers to pursue productive lives that celebrate reason and technology. She has motivated her followers to critically analyze commonly accepted wisdom, to articulate and pursue a vision of human greatness, to resist the allure of crude religious ideologies, and to value and maintain intellectual honesty and sophistication. Yet her worldview is ultimately undone by the force of its own ambitions. In her efforts to provide definitive answers to every existential question that man faces, she develops a rigid dogma that demonstrates an astonishingly simplistic and one-dimensional understanding of the human condition and of human society. Her vision lacks the grandeur and sublimity of classical political philosophy, which views nature with awe and wonder, which seeks to elevate man’s intellect without derogating others, and which sees the advancement of knowledge as the ultimate good. It promises no definitive answers, but it believes that such answers do exist, and to that end it glorifies the pursuit of reason, objectivity, and virtue, which it tempers with a humble awareness of man’s limitations. Leo Strauss unveils the solemnity and splendor of nature and the unknown, whose shadows supply humanity with a dignity and stateliness that remain foreign to Objectivist paradigms. At the conclusion of The Fountainhead, Howard Roark’s new wife, Dominique Roark, visits the construction site of Roark’s latest project, the majestic Wynand Building, and ascends to its peak on the outside hoist, watching the “pinnacles of bank buildings,” the

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“crowns of courthouses,” and the “spires of churches” descend beneath her. “Then,” the novel concludes, “there was only the ocean and the sky and the figure of Howard Roark.” 101 The image aims to inspire, but it invariably demoralizes. Standing alone on his skyscraper, Howard Roark ultimately has nowhere else to go but down.

101

Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead, 727.

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