This is a provisional first attempt at defending this proposition, which seems obvious to me but for reasons that I have trouble articulating.
First of all, in Leo Strauss's Natural Right in History, Strauss is, among other things, reacting to historicism, which understood humans as unable to escape the external forces of history that shaped them and can entirely explain their actions. The statesman, understood as impacting his social environment, violates historicism in a bold way.
Second, West Coast Straussians have adopted Lincoln as The Man. I think that this might be tied to their approval of a lawgiver, someone who is outside of the law, but establishes it for a particular community. This goes along quite nicely with the elitist idea that there are only particular people who are able to see the highest message of a work. It is appropriate for some few people to see that message (the lawgiver and those for whom it is safe to know it) and not for the masses (those to whom the law is given).
First of all, in Leo Strauss's Natural Right in History, Strauss is, among other things, reacting to historicism, which understood humans as unable to escape the external forces of history that shaped them and can entirely explain their actions. The statesman, understood as impacting his social environment, violates historicism in a bold way.
Second, West Coast Straussians have adopted Lincoln as The Man. I think that this might be tied to their approval of a lawgiver, someone who is outside of the law, but establishes it for a particular community. This goes along quite nicely with the elitist idea that there are only particular people who are able to see the highest message of a work. It is appropriate for some few people to see that message (the lawgiver and those for whom it is safe to know it) and not for the masses (those to whom the law is given).
Moreover, in my conception of how ideas develop, historical forces interact with the philosophical forces of a particular thinker. These feed off of one another and interact with each other and neither is reducible to the other. In Straussianism, however, the truth of the philosopher is removed from his historical circumstance (except insofar as historical conditions may require that he encode his ideas) and applicable, without adjustment, to any historical situation.
More to come, one day, I think.
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