A Political Philosophy

Strauss understood his thought as “political philosophy.” Heinrich Meier, editor of his complete works in German, sees its “revival . . . after [its] apparent end” as Strauss’s “life’s achievement.” The attribute “political” makes it a subdivision of philosophy. It is, he wrote in “What Is Political Philosophy?” in 1955, “a treatment which both gets to the roots and is comprehensive,” the “quest for knowledge of God, the world, and man — or rather the quest for knowledge of the natures of all things.”

The starting point of “political philosophy” is the realization that “all political action aims at either preservation or change.” The need to preserve something stems from the “wish to prevent a change to the worse,” while the desire to change something stems from the “wish to bring about something better.” However, this also means that “all political action is then guided by some thought of better and worse” and is based on the idea “of the good life, or of the good society.”

The attribute “political” refers to the “the subject matter and the function” of political philosophy. Its subject is “mankind’s great objectives: freedom and government or empire — objectives which are capable of lifting all men beyond their poor selves.” Strauss did not choose the term “poor selves” by chance. It refers to the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s famous remark on life being “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” without the all-powerful but protective state, because man is a wolf to man in the state of nature.

Alongside Baruch Spinoza, Hobbes provided the starting point for Strauss’s thinking. His first major monograph, published in Oxford in 1936, was The Political Philosophy of Hobbes. Strauss adopted his negative anthropology from Hobbes, which he also identified as the key to his work. In his conservative vein, Strauss was not concerned with interpreting Hobbes’s view of man — as historical materialists and historians of ideas would — as a theoretical expression of his experiences of civil war. Hobbes’s view finds its mirror image in John Locke, whose theory, emerging in peacetime, drew the opposite conclusions about the state-society relationship. Strauss’s concern is, instead, that Hobbes should not be historicized. His negative anthropology is an expression of a deep sense of the wickedness of man, deemed “the only true and universally valid view.” Anyone who says otherwise, who believes that people are as good or bad as the structures in which they live, is a left-wing nutcase. According to Strauss, Hobbes’s political philosophy was “the first peculiarly modern attempt to give a coherent and exhaustive answer to the question of man’s right life” and “the right order of society.”

Strauss sees Hobbes’s turn to the rationalist, methodological-individualist, ultimately liberal method as the virus that pulled the rug out from under his actual intention — the justification of the authoritarian state, i.e., an objective Strauss shared. This turn, Strauss maintains, also explains why Hobbes argues so systematically and yet contradicts himself in many of his statements. Strauss writes that “the mathematical method and materialistic metaphysics each in its own way contributed to disguise the original motivation-nexus and thus to undermine Hobbes’s political philosophy.”

The critique of Hobbes put forward by the Jewish exile Strauss much resembles the one developed simultaneously by the antisemitic Catholic Carl Schmitt, who, as the “crown jurist of the Third Reich,” had just justified the Nuremberg Race Laws. A year after Strauss, Schmitt argued in The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes that the failure of the Hobbesian justification of the absolutist state was owed to his distinction between inner faith (“fides”) and public confession (“confessio”) to the politico-theological statement that “Jesus is the Christ.” According to Schmitt, this was the work of a diabolical Jewish power that had decomposed the Leviathan as a powerful mythical symbol and made it possible for society, with its classes embroiled in civil war, to turn the state into a mechanism for its particular interests and thus destroy it.

Against Modernity

Strauss, like Schmitt, was a theorist of the counterrevolution. They both embodied a “search for a post-liberal order” as Ted V. McAllister put it in his book Revolt Against Modernity, a comparison of Strauss and Eric Voegelin. But if Schmitt’s “political theology” was the conservative movement of thought that revolved around God and the creed as a means of transcendental legitimization of power, “political philosophy” was Strauss’s means of choice in the modern secularized postwar society.

Strauss wished for a world in which people would once again find a natural place in a natural order — assigned to them by their rulers and their philosopher king advisers. He pined for the days when “the gulf separating ‘the wise’ and ‘the vulgar’ was a basic fact of human nature.” The workers, the women, the blacks, the homosexuals, and — God forbid — the transsexuals are a thorn in Strauss’s side. They all want something — and that is troubling, even intolerable.

Strauss cast liberalism and socialism as a break with traditional and legitimate thinking about the right order. He speaks of the “project of modernity” and, in “Three Waves of Modernity,” initially distances himself from conventional definitions that understand it as a “secularized biblical faith,” in which people do not “hope for life in heaven but to establish heaven on earth by purely human means.”

For Strauss, the modern project must be understood as the “rejection of premodern political philosophy.” The latter was still characterized by “a fundamental unity, a physiognomy of its own.” Modern political thought was, instead, a secularization that had ultimately brought many mutually exclusive modernities and thus “arbitrariness and subjectivism” (also of the classes) into the world.

For Strauss, however, the problem of liberalism does not begin with the usual suspect, Hobbes. Rather, Niccolo Machiavelli appears as the culprit. With his radical, ungrounded criticism of Thomas Aquinas, the Italian thinker had put an end to medieval scholasticism with its divine right of kings and the natural order derived from God and, indeed, to thinking about what constitutes a “good order.” He replaced the philosophy of “how men ought to live” with the analysis of “how mean do in fact live.” He replaced the “quest for the best political order” with “a technical problem” of how to take power and hold it. Here again, Strauss docks onto Schmitt and his view of the historical “neutralization and depoliticization” of the state, which had been transformed into a “mechanism” by the classes — the liberal bourgeoisie and the socialist working class.

Machiavelli stands for the rejection of natural right, which had until then justified natural inequality and inequity, in favor of a politics of immorality. Hobbes then introduced “individual right,” which people suddenly asserted against the state. This in turn opened the door for Locke’s liberalism and for socialism as the historic countermovement to the impositions of liberal capitalism. The Rousseau-Kant-Hegel line then finally subjected natural right to history and thus to class struggle. It forms, as McAllister puts it, “the source for the second modern form of government, communism.” Strauss attacks liberalism in this way, only to strike at socialism, which probably most disgusted him, as the supreme form of “mob rule.”

Strauss’s strategic “political philosophy” thus began with a conservative cultural criticism. He notes a decline in thought and refers positively to Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West. Strauss’s revolt against modernity is literally reaction and renaissance. He seeks to turn back the wheel of history on liberalism, seeking cues in antiquity and the Middle Ages, where he rediscovers the old “political philosophy,” now in “a state of decay.” It and political science had once been identical, in the sense of an “all-embracing study of human affairs. Today, we find it cut into pieces which behave as if they were parts of a worm.” According to Strauss, the intellectual decline is owed to the modern age and its “political situation” which is “entirely unprecedented.” This latter, he asserts, called “for an unprecedented political science,” which came as the result of “a judicious mating of dialectical materialism and psychoanalysis to be consummated on a bed supplied by logical positivism.”

Critique of Liberalism

Strauss begins his justification of a new elitist, anti-liberal tradition by attacking established science. “The majority of the great political philosophers,” he writes, were “not university professors”. Today’s professors, politicians, and state bureaucrats are characterized by profane “political thought,” whereas the political philosopher is “interested in, or attached to, the truth.” Strauss comes to the rescue of the search for truth before it is extinguished. What impressionable young student would not want to help him?

Strauss opposed both positivism and historicism. Positivism, founded by Karl Popper, was directed against historicism because — not least as the “historical school” in economics — it prevented us from arriving at dehistoricized abstract-mathematical formula sciences, which in their orientation toward the natural sciences and repeatable experiments (with always the same results) could alone lay claim to strict scientific status. Historicism and historical materialism objected that society and its economic basis are rooted in free decisions in given but changeable structures. This means that the naturalization of social science with its abstract assumptions that ignore reality — “homo oeconomicus,” “rational choice,” “transparent markets,” market equilibrium, etc. — can only lead to folly.

Strauss believed that positivism inevitably leads to relativism because “modern Western man no longer knows what he wants . . . no longer believes that he can know what is good and bad, what is right and wrong.” Weberian historicism, in turn, drowns political philosophy in what is at worst a “value-neutral” description of the history of ideas. Both had destroyed political philosophy. The “absolute knowledge of the Why” had been replaced by the “relative knowledge of the How,” because only historically changeable particular perspectives could be seen. To Strauss, Popper’s positivism even ”necessarily transforms itself into [the] historicism” he also fought against.

For Strauss, positivism and historicism are an expression of relativistic rootlessness and aimlessness. For example, it is not possible to obtain “knowledge of ‘group politics’ which deserves to be called scientific if one does not reflect on what genus of political orders is presupposed by the specific ‘group politics’ which one is studying.” The “old political science” still assumed the existence of a “common good” that could be rationally fathomed and that “in its fullness is the good society.” The “new political science” — which, based on the rational individual making rational (market) decisions, who “is by nature the sole judge of what is to his interest,” claims its own exclusive scientific status and declares all other theory to be ideology — is “as impossible” as every other “consistent manifestation of the break with common sense.” Hence why Popper had “to speak sooner or later of such things as the ‘open society,’“ i.e., reintroducing the general interest and the social through the backdoor of methodical individualism. The “open society” is, after all, the “definition of the good society.”

The other kind of liberal self-deception is to “admit the possibility of substantive group interests” but to individualize them, so to speak, in the form of the “rules of the game” (of the market), which would apply equally and therefore fairly to all competing groups. This, too, is a mere reintroduction of the general interest and the common good. Ultimately, Strauss writes, this “’group politics’ approach is a relic of Marxism.” However, the Marxist denial of a common good and general interest is “much more reasonably denied” than in liberalism, insofar as it questions it specifically in relation to “a society consisting of classes,” which is characterized by a “life-and-death struggle, overt or hidden” but generally assumes a “common good in a classless and hence stateless society comprising the whole human race or the surviving part of it.”

Strauss identified the blind spots of liberalism. For Schmitt’s critique of parliamentarianism and the rule of law, this already included the question of deciding between friend and foe and what to do in the state of exception when social order collapses. Schmitt opted for dictatorship, in the presidentialist form of Paul von Hindenburg — “sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception” — and later fascism, in which “the Führer protects the law.” For Strauss, it is political philosophers who enjoy the privilege of coming close to the truth, as “real men,” and who thus have the right to decide right and wrong.

The existence of philosopher kings who show the way, who are “making value judgments,” is crucial in terms of the raison d’etat. Because the unprincipled (liberal) opportunist who always hangs his flag in the wind is not trustworthy, he must end up like Thrasymachus in the first book of Plato’s Republic. Value neutrality is a chimera, not least with Popper, whose falsification method ultimately implies the “depreciation of pre-scientific knowledge,” with the result of either “sterile investigations” or “complicated idiocies” with “irrelevant or misleading results”: “Things which every ten-year-old child of normal intelligence knows” are regarded by Popper “as being in need of scientific proof,” which is “not only not necessary” but “not even possible”.

Strauss’s criticism is razor-sharp and at this point compatible with the critique of Popper put forward by Max Horkheimer and then by Theodor W. Adorno. It is also compatible with a materialist theory of ideology, as can be read in Jan Rehmann’s excellent introductory book on the subject.

Strauss’s criticism also politically reflects the power-blind and opportunistic basic tendency of the liberal centrist, who chooses to place himself in the “center.” This latter, as we often see, may distinguish himself from the “extremists” on the Left and Right and declare that “red equals brown,” as the “horseshoe theory” commands, but can never justify what content actually constitutes the “center.” The liberal’s assertion that he stands for “democracy,” writes Strauss, are “mere movement of his lips and tongue, to which nothing corresponds in his heart or mind.” The talk of “democracy” — or today “our values,” being defended in Ukraine, etc. — is nothing more than “an alibi for thoughtlessness and vulgarity,” because those who profess it say “in effect that one does not have to think about the reasons why these things are good.” This liberalism is the path to “conformism and philistinism” in science, society, and politics. Strauss aptly explains that the liberal who claims to be value neutral in Max Weber’s sense, i.e., to have virtually no ideology, has “invisible value judgments.” In science, this ideology can be seen in “allegedly purely descriptive concepts,” for example, when social-scientists “distinguish between democratic and authoritarian habits or types of human beings” while “what they call ‘authoritarian’ is in all cases known to me a caricature of everything of which they, as good democrats of a certain kind, disapprove.” In terms of political philosophy, this means that a society “cannot be defined without reference to its purpose.”

This casts a sharp critical light on the New Cold War advocates of “democracies versus autocracies.” For Strauss, “one cannot clarify the character of a specific democracy . . . or of democracy in general without having a clear understanding of the alternatives to democracy.” By ”remaining within a horizon which is defined by the given political order and its opposite,” scientific political scientists are inclined to leave it at the distinction between democracy and authoritarianism, i.e. they absolutize the given political order.” However, such science then serves the “thoughtless acceptance” and apologetics of the status quo and “one’s own power interests and their enforcement, also internationally.”

Strauss’s ideological critique of liberalism could be used to justify socialist democracy, which sees its purpose in the self-organization, self-liberation, and self-determination of producers in all areas of their lives, including their workplaces, and aligns the organization of the state with these same goals. For Strauss, however, the critique of liberalism should not lead to more democracy but, on the contrary, to the “tyranny of the wise,” i.e., his preferred authoritarianism. This is based on total contempt for the masses and egalitarianism. In fact, he writes, no one can be a good scientist in the sense of political philosophy who sees no reason for “despising people whose horizon is limited to their consumption of food and digestion.” Strauss goes on to defend the power of elites over the masses by actively countering the argument that the ancient Greek philosophers were antidemocratic because of the underdevelopment of the productive forces, which structurally limited education to only a few. Rather, this separation of elite and mass is presented as a value in itself.

Power of Convention

In On Tyranny, from 1948, Xenophon is Strauss’s key witness for the value judgment that “beneficient tyranny or the rule of a tyrant who listens to the counsels of the wise is, as a matter of principle, preferable to the rule of laws,” i.e., a constitutional state, “or to the rule of elected magistrates as such.” Two years later, in Natural Right and History, Strauss argued that there is no “common good” even in the “truth” that the philosopher kings strive for. The commonwealth is “always either a democracy or an oligarchy or a monarchy and so on.” Every form of rule and its laws are those “of a section.” Even democracy, “which claims to be the rule of all,” is at best the “rule of the majority of all adults,” but the majority is “the poor; and the poor are a section, however numerous, which has an interest distinct from the interests of the other sections.”

Strauss denies that the seemingly particular interests of the poor, of the workers — a wage to live on, affordable housing, a life that is also self-determined in the sphere of work and production, etc., in short, in human dignity — are the only ones that can be universalized. He draws the opposite conclusion: if domination is always arbitrary anyway and is based on violence — of the majority over the minority, of a minority over the majority — then no principle of truth or what is right, no common good, applies here either. There is only “conventionalism.” Precisely because there is no natural determination — not even language, citizenship, etc. — where the boundary between inside and outside, friend and foe, runs, any rule is the baseless enforcement of the common interests of a group. Power in the state is not the result of any notion of “justice” but of a “gang of robbers,” understood as a “multitude of human beings” who have “banded together in order to take care of their common interest — over against other human beings, . . . foreigners and slaves.”

With this realistic description of bourgeois rule, Strauss undermines the idea of natural, innate rights, from which immanently derived legitimate rule and Rousseauian popular sovereignty arise. He advocates a nihilism of rights in which conventionally exercised power is legitimate in itself. For Strauss, the critique of Machiavelli and the simultaneous implementation and affirmation of the Machiavellian exercise of power, unrestricted by laws and moral restraints, go hand in hand. He advocates a Nietzschean “will to power” that determines what is true and virtuous. The rule of law, which restricts the arbitrary exercise of power, is replaced by sovereign power, whose legitimacy is derived from itself because there is no longer any external, abstract justification for it. “The best regime” in the sense of classical political philosophy, is not that which appears “most desirable,” but that which is “feasible or . . . possible on earth” because it corresponds to “human nature,” which — according to Strauss’s negative anthropology — is characterized by an inherent striving for dominance. Insofar as it does not build castles in the sky and requires “no miraculous or nonmiraculous change in human nature,” no “abolition or eradication of evil and imperfection” for its realization, the inevitable predatory rule is just. In essence, Strauss is echoing classical nineteenth-century conservative thought, which argued that alternative societal designs of deficient sinners would outrage God and his inner-worldly ordering work.

Strauss’s problem is that not only do opportunists and technocrats quickly lose the trust of the masses in a system of universal suffrage — as we see today — but they are also not so keen on being ruled by tyrants allied to philosopher kings who show only contempt for their “slave morality.” The “citizen king” may be hailed by his subjects — the cynicism king, not so much. Strauss himself acknowledges the “unnatural character of slavery.” It goes “against any man’s grain to be made a slave or to be treated as a slave.”

Strauss was well aware that he was advancing these thoughts in the United States of the 1950s. Like all right-wingers, he hated the social democratization brought about by the New Deal — but also understood its mass appeal. Consequently, his thinking revolved around the question of how the masses can be controlled in a mass democracy.

Strauss the Cynic

Strauss’s thought runs in parallel to the antidemocratic ideas of the economic right: Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Murray Rothbard, etc. But while the market radicals saw in the Keynesian welfare state the most repugnant form of “mob rule” and assumed that people would never vote for its dismantling and the unleashing of market forces — hence why a temporary dictatorship might be necessary — Strauss’s realist thinking focused on how the political right could turn the slaves into good sheep of the authoritarian “Machtstaat,” executing its power. If rule is always that of a “gang of robbers” that wants to oppress and exploit other parts of society and foreign countries, how can this rule nevertheless be legitimized and stabilized? How can people be dominated without them realizing it or rebelling against it? How do the anti-egalitarian philosopher kings prevent the working masses from condemning the enemies of democracy — because we only know the Athenian democracy and its deep quality from their perspective — to death (Socrates) or driving them into exile (Xenophon)?

Strauss reminds us that “being a tyrant, being called a tyrant and not a king, means having been unable to transform tyranny into kingship,” understood as “rule over willing subjects.” The best tyranny is that able to appear as legitimate kingship, even if it is “essentially rule without laws” based solely with “the will of the ruler.” This then is “tyranny at its best.”

But how can this be achieved? Strauss proposes with Simonides, in whom he wants to see an early Machiavellian, that the authoritarian ruler, who cannot hide his exercise of power behind impersonal laws, limits his tasks to “gratifying things (such as the awarding of prizes)” while entrusting to others the punitive actions” and avoiding “openly taking responsibility for punitive action.” The handing out of gifts, awards, permission to enrich oneself, etc. serves — one inevitably thinks of Vladimir Putin’s deal with the Russian oligarchs — “the purpose of keeping the subjects busy with their private concerns rather than with public affairs.”

Above all, however, Strauss seeks to make use of the Enlightenment for the “tyranny of the wise”, which in its dialectic as mastery over nature can be an exit from “self-imposed immaturity,” as Kant had it, while optimizing domination with the help of psychological insights into mass consciousness. Strauss’s focus is on propaganda. As much as Strauss is disturbed by the inwardness and individualization that went hand in hand with the twentieth-century psychologization of society, he recognizes the means of population control that lie dormant in psychoanalysis.

This search for control makes Strauss a cynic in relation to power and its application. While the philosopher kings emerge from Plato’s cave and strive toward the light of knowledge, the democratic masses must be guided in their natural ignorance. The “faith in universal enlightenment,” he writes, has obscured “from a few generations” the “importance of ‘propaganda’” and only now is one becoming aware of the “need for vulgar rhetoric” as the rhetoric for the vulgar.

The mastermind of mass psychology as a technique of power was Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud. He learned the craft of psychological warfare as early as 1917, coining the famous narrative “make the world safe for democracy,” used to persuade a reluctant US population into World War I. Bernays called his work “propaganda,” including in the 1928 book of the same name. Bernays’s methods were used in product advertising by industrial corporations, party and media communication, etc. In the end, propaganda was also applied to the theory itself, as Bernays soon spoke only of “public relations.”

In Propaganda, Bernays openly writes that there exists “an invisible government” in liberal-parliamentarian societies which, through an “unseen mechanism,” directs social processes. According to Bernays, it is “the true ruling power of our country. . . . We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.” But that is, in Bernays’s view, precisely the goal, because “the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.” Of course, “in theory, every citizen makes up his mind on public questions and matters of private conduct.” In practice, however, it is impossible to deal with “the abstruse economic, political and ethical data involved in every question” in order to “come to a conclusion about anything.” Hence, “we have voluntarily agreed to let an invisible government sift the data and high-spot the outstanding issues so that our field of choice shall be narrowed to practical proportions.”

Strauss could hardly agree more. He establishes a second cave allegory, which amounts to the rulers having to hide their actual goals. The clandestine nature of the Straussians, later said to be like Freemasons introducing each other into powerful positions — for many also implying the allure of an elite cult — reflected their sense that the masses felt how much they were despised. Hence the Straussians could only act in secret.

Hence also why Strauss distinguished between an “esoteric” and an “exoteric” way of writing: “What is called freedom of thought in a large number of cases amounts to . . . the ability to choose between two or more different views presented by the small minority of people who are public speakers or writers.” If the intellectual whose thinking does not follow the hegemonic ideology wants to preserve his “intellectual independence,” then he must get into the habit of ambiguous esoteric writing. “Persecution,” writes Strauss, “cannot prevent independent thinking,”; it “cannot prevent even public expression of the heterodox truth” as long as the intellectual who thinks against the grain “moves with circumspection” and “is capable of writing between the lines.”  The chosen ones — Strauss distinguishes in Nietzschean style between “thoughtless men” who are “careless readers” and “thoughtful men” who are “careful readers” — could decipher the truth. The text, which only reaches the initiated, the intellectual elite, “is addressed, not to all readers, but to trustworthy and intelligent readers only.” It has “all the advantages of private communication without having its greatest disadvantage — that it reaches only the writer’s acquaintances.” Still, “a careful writer of normal intelligence” who knows how to place his political explosives in such a way that they do “not usually occur in the preface or other very conspicuous places” is still “more intelligent than the most intelligent censor” because “the burden of proof rests with the censor.”

We may doubt whether this trust in reason and accountability really applies, and whether authoritarian states really have to provide evidence before getting rid of disagreeable critics. In times when Twitter/X mobs can oust public figures from their positions and university administrations reflexively bow to online pressure, Strauss’s assessment seems wildly optimistic. Moreover, the most tyrannical of all societies would seemingly be the France of the 1970s: How else can the incomprehensible “gibberish” of the “radical chic” philosophers in France be explained? Strauss also clearly warned against always wanting to write and read between the lines, even where this was not necessary. There is “legitimate and illegitimate reading between the lines.”

On the one hand, the exoteric/esoteric distinction is suitable as a method of analyzing texts that were written under persecution, such as the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, who wrote not about “Marxism” but about the “philosophy of praxis” under censorship in Fascist jail. His Marxism is understandable only if we do know the circumstances of its origins. On the other hand, this distinction points to an intellectual attitude that does not seek to abolish the master-servant relationship through the democratization of knowledge but to strengthen it. Here the master — in Strauss’s diction, the philosopher — learns not only to lie to the censor but also to the masses about his own antidemocratic goals and to reveal them “esoterically” only to the philosopher kings. Strauss laments the fact that modernity has lost the acceptance of the “gulf separating ‘the wise’ and ‘the vulgar,’” which until then had been recognized as “a basic fact of human nature” that no “progress of popular education” can make up for because “philosophy, or science, was essentially a privilege of ‘the few.’”

Strauss’s indulgence in the calloused spirit of cultural decline, which has linked the elitist right from Oswald Spengler and Arnold J. Toynbee to Charles Murray, is of course linked to the discontent with democracy in which all people are at least formally equal. This creates the problem of how to say that people are naturally unequal (in value), which is why there is no point in educating the proles, introducing comprehensive schools, free college, etc. — but without them realizing it. How can it be expressed academically that workers, women, black people, and Latinos are considered unequal, irrational, childlike, and simply dumber, which is why they shouldn’t act up like they do, if all these social groups have the right to vote? Strauss was already schooling the US right in the methods of formulating antidemocratic, classist, sexist, and racist ideas through the insistence that “It’s a free country! I’m entitled to my opinion,” while expecting not to be criticized as racist, sexist, and misanthropic by the “politically correct.” One method is to “conceal their opinions from all but philosophers, either by limiting themselves to oral instruction of a carefully selected group of pupils, or by writing about the most important subject by means of ‘brief indication.’”

You might now think, “Let the assholes who despise the ordinary people who built their professorial luxury houses and cars, pick the tobacco leaves and grapevines, clean their apartments, cook and serve the food, deliver the mail and parcels, etc., pursue their passion among themselves.” However, it is not that simple, because contempt does not remain private. It came out of German far-right leader Björn Höcke, for example, when, in an interview with a journalist who asked him about his demagogic way of speaking, he said with a nod and a wink that they both knew that some truths had to be expressed in populist terms so that the proles could also understand them. Only through such propaganda could they bring Höcke to the power to which he lays a natural claim.

As an elite by natural right, Strauss and his followers also claimed the right to justify mass manipulation, to keep the population in the dark about the attitudes, actions, and goals of those in power, instead of contributing to the spiritual liberation of all as critics of power, as the Enlightenment intended. For Strauss, this also includes an instrumental relationship to religion. In 1932, he wrote to one correspondent that he was “not capable of faith” and was thus “looking for a way to live without faith.” However, if atheism or agnosticism are for him an expression of a master morality reminiscent of Richard Dawkins, he also sees the promotion of religiosity as an essential anchor for the stabilization of power and mobilization for the anti-egalitarian right.

Strauss thus combines ancient philosophy with the darkest Nietzscheanism. He was, writes critic Shadia B. Drury, “not a traditional conservative nor a quiet interpreter of old texts, but a representative of a new brand of rabid, radical, nihilistic, and postmodern conservatism.”

Strauss Lives

Strauss retired in 1969. He finally died in October 1973, in Annapolis, Maryland. Just five weeks earlier, the market fundamentalists around Friedman and his “Chicago Boys,” long close to Strauss, had put into practice their conviction that no people could be so stupid as to freely choose the dismantling of the welfare state and the capitalist commodification of education, health, pensions, etc. Their “free market” instead had to enter the world via the detour and the tortures of dictatorship, with Augusto Pinochet’s counterrevolutionary regime in Chile. Strauss, on the other hand, believed that even with universal suffrage, the people, this “big lout,” could be kept under control.

Still, Strauss would also enjoy power, at least indirectly. Just as the “incel” takes refuge in Übermensch philosophy out of his narcissistic inferiority complex, Strauss offers a home to many misanthropes. Nietzsche’s poison is always at work, and Strauss embodies it. Even during his life, a large following developed around him. Some speak of a “cult” due to the cultivated culture of a small, conspiratorial group of the chosen.

A few selected “Straussians” became famous as hawkish neocons, even so-called Leo-Cons. The most important was Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense in the George W. Bush administration. He pushed for a war against Iraq already before 9/11 and, the very next day, tried to persuade National Security Council member Richard Clarke to establish a link between Iraq and the Twin Towers attacks because “it was too sophisticated and complicated an operation . . . for a terrorist group to have pulled off by itself.” When this didn’t work (Clarke later resigned in protest), the Bush administration justified the war by citing alleged weapons of mass destruction that could reach NATO bases in the eastern Mediterranean within forty-five minutes. Wolfowitz later admitted that Secretary of State Colin Powell lied before the UN General Assembly and that the evidence for the weapons was largely fabricated. The actual aim of the war had been another. Around one million people, the vast majority of them civilians, paid for it with their lives.

In Straussian terms, this was a “noble lie” — the kind that is still with us. When Donald Trump and his running mate were called out for spreading lies about Haitian immigrants eating white Americans’ beloved pets, Vance responded, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” The spirit of Strauss is alive.