In a world shattered by violence and penetrated by personal accusations of thinkers held responsible for violence, it is with great relief to find a book devoted to seeking peace. Robert Howse's book exposes the false claims made by both sides of a controversy over one thinker, Leo Strauss. Strauss was a Jewish refugee from Weimar Germany who, at the University of Chicago, taught courses and wrote books and essays about the works of great political philosophers. Howse, a Professor of International Law at NYU Law School, carefully examines what Strauss has contributed to exposing the root causes of modern warfare and the preconditions for peace in our time.
Like Socrates, Strauss was the object of both extreme adoration by his students and extreme hatred by scholars who found his works challenged the validity and truth of theirs. As American politics became more ideological, Strauss himself became the subject of a political controversy. Some of his attackers asserted that he was personally anti-liberal, a closet totalitarian, even a closet Nazi. Some of his students, in defending him, actually attacked liberalism, claiming that they understood Strauss' "teachings" and that his enemies didn't. Other of his admirers and students hijacked his inquiries in creating another political ideology, "neo-conservatism," which confirmed the image of Strauss as a teacher of war in the mind of his critics.
Howse's book challenges all sides of the controversy by exploring not only Strauss' published works, but letters that he wrote to several of his friends about the goals of his studies and transcripts of several of his courses that were made from tapes recorded while the courses were being taught. He demonstrates that Leo Strauss turned away from his early attraction to radical historicists like Nietzsche when he discovered in the legal theory of a fellow German, Carl Schmitt, the desire to destroy destroying the unsettled democratic institutions of Weimar Germany and supporting the rise of Nazism. Strauss also opposed the vision of Russo-French philosopher, Alexandre Kojeve, who, in both his philosophic inquiries and his work as a French bureaucrat, sought an integrated world in which local identities would eventually disappear.
In supporting his claim that Strauss was a Man of Peace, Howse chronicles Strauss' study of Thucydides' account of the war between Athens and Sparta and how that inquiry led him to realize the importance of moderation in politics, given the inclination humans have towards violence. He also demonstrates how the study of Thucydides prepared Strauss to carefully study Machiavelli's works. He discovered in modern political philosophy, the desire to create the modern amoral secular state, and which justified war and violence in the name of some end of war and violence. In light of that discovery, Strauss aimed at recovering the lessons of earlier philosophers - of ancient Greece and medieval Islam and Judaism - which acknowledged the dangerous nature of humans but sought institutional and moral-religious ways to contain it.
The uniqueness of Howse's book, however, is his chapter on Strauss' course on Hugh Grotius, the father of modern international law and a course on Immanuel Kant. In Grotius, Strauss found a modern political philosopher whose work most closely treats the greatest challenge of modern political life - how in a globalized world, nations and individuals may retrain their personal identities all the while participating in global institutions. Howse describes Strauss' evolving concern modern international law, which he describes as International Humanitarian Law, "the search for `a middle way between strict morality and sheer Machiavellianism." In Kant Strauss found the limits on any human dream of Perpetual Peace.
Howse concludes that Strauss' intellectual life was devoted to discovering what limits exist in political life and what we humans can reasonably hope for in the future. He also laid out, as close as might be possible, the conditions that must exist for that hope to come to fruition. This is an inquiry that any educated person does well to consider and reading Howse's book is an edifying way to do so.
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