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Correcting the Record
on Leo Strauss

When I was young we thought
we could count on the New York
Times for accuracy. But we've re-
ceived nothing near accuracy in the
Times's recent articles about Leo
Strauss and his influence. The real
question about those articles should
be, it seems to me, What has hap-
pened to the Times! That's beyond
my competence. It might not be a
very appropriate topic for a daily
newspaper, but since the Times has
spread the stuff it has about a man
who deserves much better, people
who know something about Strauss
and Straussians should be allowed
to try to straighten out their misin-
formed readers. Looking for de-
mons is not the best way to account
for election results one doesn't like.

Brent Staples's prejudiced out-
burst, to paraphrase one of Strauss's
favorite authors, Jane Austen, does
not deserve the compliment of ra-
tional opposition. Richard Bern-
stein tried and succeeded at being
more fair. But first some facts.
Robert Bork is not a Straussian.
(I think he'd be better off, if he
were.) In fact, he has been criti-
cized in print (not as a judge, but
as a thinker, or scholar) for his rel-
ativism by more than one Straus-
sian. Both William Bennett and
William Kristol have studied and
taught philosophy. They both ex-
hibit the kind of good sense that
indicates they might have been in-
fluenced by Leo Strauss. While it is
true that most of Strauss's students
are labeled politically as more or
less conservative, there are some
thoughtful Straussians who are
clearly known as liberals, and who,
for instance, supported Bill Clinton
for president. There is no single
contemporary political stance that
follows necessarily from Strauss's
teaching.

The one person who, understand-
ably, has ticked off the Times's
writers most is my old friend and

fellow student, Allan Bloom. "Pro-
fessor Strauss appealed to conser-
vatives like Mr. Bloom because he
was unapologetically elitist" (Bern-
stein). Elitism, used in this way,
sounds almost like some congenital
disease. People who use the word
seem to think that it automatically
licenses them to ignore the political
arguments of those they disagree
with. The closest natural, nonideo-
logical word to what the users of
the term call elitist is probably the
word snob. Leo Strauss was in
many ways extraordinary, but his
manners reflected his rural small
town background: they were sim-
ple, direct, and natural, in no way
snobbish. Allan Bloom too was cer-
tainly no snob, but occasionally he
allowed himself to look like one.

What attracted us to Strauss was
no mystery. We had been attracted
to philosophy and especially Plato
by our undergraduate studies.
Strauss's courses and person were
unlike anything we had seen before
(or have seen since). Books we
thought we had understood fairly
well turned out to be far more chal-
lenging, fascinating, bold, careful,
and intricate than anyone had ever
led us to believe. In his teaching
Strauss himself exhibited a delight
and joy in learning that could not
help but be catching. The first ef-
fect of all this was quite humbling:
we learned that what we thought
was our best was not good enough.
I can still hear the "sinister" elitist
Bloom, in the middle of a discus-
sion after one of those classes say-
ing something like, "Oh Larry,
isn't it wonderful that two little
guys like us can take part in these
things!" Allan Bloom was a
thoughtful, sometimes brilliant,
very articulate, pesky, sometimes
outrageous, man. He was also a lot
of fun, which explains in part why
he was such an effective teacher.

When we were in college, the
dominant view in the social sci-
ences was Max Weber's that state-
ments of fact and judgments of

value must be strictly distinguished,
that social science must be ethi-
cally neutral. What first attracted
many of us was Strauss's powerful
critique, if not refutation, of that
view: it became possible for us to
argue, as social scientists, that seg-
regation in the south (and north)
was wrong, that Joseph McCarthy
was a dangerous demagogue, that
liberal democracy was better than
Marxist totalitarianism: it freed us
from the debilitating view that to
attempt to understand what consti-
tutes a good society is nothing
more than spelling out one's own
emotional preferences.

Critics confuse Strauss's critique
of the philosophy of liberalism with
an attack on liberal democracy it-
self, despite the fact that he criti-
cizes the philosophy in part for its
failure to defend liberal democratic
institutions adequately. There is an
entire book dedicated to this sub-
ject: The Crisis of Liberal Democ-
racy: a Straussian Perspective,
K. L. Deutsch and W. Softer, eds.,
[SUNY Press, 1987]. The best arti-
cle I know on this topic is in that
book, "Leo Strauss and the Crisis
of Liberal Democracy," by Hilail
Gildin. It includes the observation,
"That Strauss and the classics fa-
vored the rule of law rather than
men and were averse to arbitrary
government is not plain to all. That
is because although their support of
the rule of law was unhesitating,
their approval of it was not unqual-
ified."

The most intelligent and ade-
quate defense of the rule of law
must not blind itself to its inescap-
able defects. Gildin carefully ex-
plains why Strauss could argue
"that liberal or constitutional de-
mocracy comes closer to what the
classics demanded than any alter-
native that is viable in our age."
Most, if not all of us, run up against
what we believe to be petty and
not so petty injustices almost every
day. It's not too difficult to appreci-
ate why decent people dream about

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or long for perfectly wise and just
governors, for what Plato referred
to as "philosopher kings." Strauss
taught, following Plato, why, de-
spite the purity and nobility of that
longing, it was not, and could per-
haps never be, politically viable;
that, given human beings as we
know them, the second best, the
rule of law, is the politically best.
All this should remind politically
literate Americans of The Federal-
ist, No. 51.

Some final remarks about the
buzz word elitism. Those who use
the word, it seems to me, misun-
derstand the virtues of American
democracy: the good in their minds
which is opposed to the evil, elit-
ism, would seem to be unbridled
egalitarian democracy. The word
elite is, of course, originally
French, derived from the word for
elect. It is a collective noun mean-
ing basically the elect, those who
have been elected or chosen, some-
times by God or nature, for some
special task. The founder of the
Democratic Party used a classical
Greek word for elite: "May we not
even say, that that form of govern-
ment is the best, which provides
the most effectually for a pure se-
lection of these natural aristoi into
the offices of government? The arti-
ficial aristocracy is a mischievous
ingredient in government . . . "
(Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John
Adams, 10/28/1813). The founder of
the Republican Party cautions us:
"I think the authors of [the Decla-
ration of Independence] intended to
include all men, but they did not
intend to declare all men equal in
all respects. They did not mean to
say all were equal in color, size,
intellect, moral developments, or
social capacity. They defined with
tolerable distinctness, in what re-
spects they did consider all men
created equal—equal in 'certain
inalienable rights, among which are
life, liberty, and the pursuit of hap-
piness.'" (Abraham Lincoln,
Springfield, Illinois, 6/26/1857).

American democracy, I believe
most people would agree, stands or
falls by free elections. Free elec-
tions would seem to presuppose
both inequalities of ability to fulfill
the offices for which the elections
are held, and the capacities of vot-

ers roughly to discern those in-
equalities. The "nice" word for
these inequalities is merit. Free
elections, to sum up, introduce a
principle of merit into our political
system, predicated on inequalities
of ability to fulfill the offices for
which the elections are held. Rep-
resentative democracy, The Feder-
alist teaches, is the way to avoid
the usual pitfalls of direct democ-
racy: The specter of direct elec-
tronic democracy, the threats to
genuinely deliberate and rational
democracy, should cause us to re-
consider those arguments carefully.

The health and long life of liberal
democracy, both the classics and
The Federalist teach, depend upon
an enlightened citizenry that is
clear about the limitations as well
as the virtues of democracy. No
one, as far as I know, put it better
than Lincoln (in his First Inaugu-
ral): "A majority held in restraint
by constitutional checks and limita-
tions, and always changing easily
with deliberate changes of popular
opinion and sentiment is the only
true sovereign of a free people."
Unbridled egalitarian democracy is
one of the most direct roads
through demagoguery to despotism.
Bridled, or constitutional and rep-
resentative, democracy would seem
to be the way for those who are
interested in combining political
freedom with high civilization over
the long haul.

Laurence Berns
5?. John's College

Politics and Literature:
Still Alive and Well

As an "outsider" as far as the
practicalities of American academia
are concerned, I have been privi-
leged to play some part in the rec-
ognition of the importance of "poli-
tics and literature" in the discipline
as recognized by "the emergence
of an Organized Section devoted to
the study of politics and litera-
ture," reported in the Symposium
on Literature and Politics in the
June 1995 issue of PS. Catherine
Zuckert concludes her brief intro-
duction with the comment that the
contributions to this symposium,
originally delivered at a roundtable

at the 1994 Annual Meeting, "What
Literature Can Teach Us About
Politics," "provide . . . examples
of some of the kinds of work that
can be done in this new subfield."

The appearance of this work, as
a major feature in PS, is so wel-
come that I hesitate to quibble,
particularly with Catherine Zuckert
herself, whose work in this subfield
I have been aware of and have ac-
knowledged, both personally and
publicly, over the last 15 years or
so. But there, in effect, is the basis
of a necessary, rather than merely
pedantic, reservation. The Orga-
nized Section is indeed new: the
subfield certainly is not.

For instance, on the semi-orga-
nized level, as my 1983 PS survey
of the "politics and literature"
scene indicates, APS A has an hon-
orable record of encouragement
dating from at least the early 1960s.
And as I also indicated there, and
in my updating in 1993, many
American political scientists have
long taught, published and deliv-
ered conference papers on "politics
and literature." ("Politics and Lit-
erature," News for Teachers of
Political Science, Fall 1983, pp.
17-19 [American Political Science
Association]; "Only Connect: Poli-
tics and Literature 10 Years Later,
1982-92," PS: Political Science &
Politics, June 1993, pp. 257-62).

Mention should also be made, in
this context, of Benjamin Barber
and Michael McGrath's edited col-
lection, The Artist and Political
Vision (Brunswick, NJ: Transaction
Books, 1981) and of the papers that
I edited in Reading Political Sto-
ries: Representations of Politics in
Novels and Pictures (Savage, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 1992), both
of which well demonstrate what
Zuckert refers to in relation to the
symposium contributions: that they
"represent different approaches
and interests," "are intended to be
suggestive," and "provide elegant
and enticing examples of some of
the kinds of work that can be
done." Indeed, the roundtable pa-
pers printed in PS nicely comple-
ment the earlier indications of what
can be done.

The same issue of PS that con-
tains the symposium also includes
the provisional program for the

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1995 Annual Meeting. Those of us
who have sometimes despaired
about the lack of imagination—and
recourse to imaginative sources—of
our colleagues should be encour-
aged by the number of papers—
some dozen or so outside of the

Organized Section panels—that re-
fer to art forms of various kinds. I
welcome the evidence that film and
drama, as well as fiction and po-
etry, are being brought into politi-
cal analysis and discussion in ways
that, as Catherine Zuckert and I,

and many others, from a variety
of political science perspectives,
have long argued, can only enhance
political understanding.

Maureen Whitebrook
University of Sheffield

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December 1995 661