Abstract
Leo Strauss’s correspondence with German philosopher Gerhard Krüger is an invaluable source for those who seek to understand Strauss’s complex and debated thought. Dating mostly from the early 1930s—a period in which Strauss went through a decisive “reorientation”—the exchange deals with several important themes and overall has a lively and straightforward style that proves to be extremely useful for the interpreter who wishes to grasp the guiding ideas of each of them.
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- 1.
I wish to thank Dino Cofrancesco , Daniel Doneson , Martha Rice Martini , and (last but not least) Rory Schacter for their valuable comments and suggestions.
- 2.
Leo Strauss, “Conspectivism,” in Martin D. Yaffe and Richard S. Ruderman , eds, Reorientation: Leo Strauss in the 1930s (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 217–224; “Religious Situation of the Present,” in Reorientation, 225–235; “Review of Julius Ebbinghaus , On the Progress of Metaphysics,” in LSEW, 214–216.
- 3.
NRH, 24–25. Cf. GS-3, 396.
- 4.
Leo Strauss, “Foreword to a Planned Book on Hobbes,” in HCR, 137–149.
- 5.
GS-3, 396.
- 6.
Strauss, “Foreword to a Planned Book on Hobbes,” 148–149.
- 7.
RSP, 228.
- 8.
Strauss, “Foreword to a Planned Book on Hobbes,” 141.
- 9.
Strauss, “Foreword to a Planned Book on Hobbes,” 140, 141.
- 10.
GS-3, 394.
- 11.
Plato, Statesman, 272b 1–3.
- 12.
PPH, 23–25; Leo Strauss, The Origin of Modern Political Thought, Leo Strauss. Papers, [Box 14, Folder 11], Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library, 19–20.
- 13.
Plato, Statesman, 271e 6–7.
- 14.
GS-3, 440.
- 15.
GS-3, 394.
- 16.
Cf. GS-3, 407, 409.
- 17.
See GS-3, 441, where Strauss significantly, but somewhat enigmatically, states: “Starting with the analysis of the inverted [verkehrt] or indifferent use of reason, of the inverted or indifferent life … is that which distinguishes modern morality as such from its classic counterpart. … It is the egress from an inverted state of nature (Hobbes) or indifferent state of nature (Rousseau), from an original freedom , that is only later restricted.”
- 18.
GS-3, 414.
- 19.
Leo Strauss, “Notes on Carl Schmitt , The Concept of the Political,” in Heinrich Meier , Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss. The Hidden Dialogue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press , 1995), 89–119.
- 20.
GS-3, 399.
- 21.
Ibid.
- 22.
Ibid.
- 23.
Ibid. Regarding “giving and receiving reason,” see Plato, The Statesman, 286a 4–5.
- 24.
GS-3, 399.
- 25.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Chap. 14 (London: Penguin Books, 1985), 189.
- 26.
PLA, 137–138 (note 13), where also Krüger’s essay Philosophie und Moral in der Kantischen Kritik (Tubingen 1931) is mentioned. On the still open and problematic character of the Socratic-Platonic inquiry into the “right way of life,” see, for example, GS-3, 417.
- 27.
GS-3, 399.
- 28.
Meier , Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, 130.
- 29.
Strauss, “Notes on Carl Schmitt,” 117.
- 30.
My emphasis.
- 31.
PPH, 16; NRH, 249–250.
- 32.
GS-3, 402.
- 33.
GS-3, 404.
- 34.
GS-3, 442. See PLA, 21–22, including note 1 on the “irrationalistic” character of modern rationalism .
- 35.
Cf. Plato, Protagoras, 321c 5–6, with Hobbes, Leviathan, Chap. 13, 186.
- 36.
GS-3, 426. These two utterances are interspersed with the following, somewhat enigmatic remark: “In a world that arises without plan or order , everything human is in order (Socrates can be glad to live among Athenians and not among the wild), whereas in truth it is the case that, in a world produced through planning, the human realm is precisely not in order.” By saying so, Strauss seems to be underlining the “revolutionary” effect of natural right on the established political order (which always falls short of it), as he will famously restate in Natural Right and History (13–14).
- 37.
GS-3, 424.
- 38.
GS-3, 426.
- 39.
GS-3, 424.
- 40.
Plato, Phaedo, 99c 5.
- 41.
Plato, Phaedo, 99e 5.
- 42.
GS-3, 399.
- 43.
Cf. Jean-Jacques Rousseau , “Discourse on the Sciences and Arts,” in The First and Second Discourses, ed. Roger D. Masters (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964), 38.
- 44.
GS-3, 435. Cf. Meier , Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, 129–131.
- 45.
GS-3, 430.
- 46.
On this blunder, I refer the reader to my essay “‘German Stranger’ o ‘Guter Europäer’? A proposito di una recente interpretazione della ‘filosofia politica’ di Leo Strauss,” in Biblioteca della libertà, XLVIII (2013), settembre-dicembre, n. 208 online, 61–87.
- 47.
GS-3, 625. I am following the translation Susan Shell provides in “‘To Spare the Vanquished and Crush the Arrogant’: Leo Strauss’s Lecture on ‘German Nihilism,’” in Steven B. Smith , ed., The Cambridge Companion to Leo Strauss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 171–192 (trans. quoted on pages 185–186).
- 48.
GS-3, 625. The full quotation from Virgil ’s Aeneid (VI, 851–3) reads as follows: “Tu regere imperio populos, Romane , memento (hae tibi erunt artes) pacisque imponere morem, parcere subiectis et debellare superbos” (You, Roman, remember to rule the peoples with power—these will be your skills—and to impose the custom of peace, to spare the subjects and crush the arrogant).
- 49.
GS-3, 627.
- 50.
GS-3, 433.
- 51.
There is in fact no encyclopedia article “on the state” in Mussolini’s opera.
- 52.
Inter alia: “Fascism wants man active and committed to action with all his energy … It conceives of life as a fight, holding that it is up to man to conquer that life which is really worthy of him by creating, first of all in himself, the tool (material, moral, intellectual) to build it. … Hence, the high worth of culture in all its forms (art, religion , science ) and the utmost importance of education . Hence, the essential worth of labor as well, by which man conquers [vince] nature and creates the human world (economic, political, moral, intellectual),” Scritti e discorsi di Benito Mussolini , vol. viii (Milano: Ulrico Hoepli, 1934), 69. On the importance of labor in this modern, distinctly Hegelian sense, cf. NRH, 250.
- 53.
GS-3, 433.
- 54.
GS-3, 432.
- 55.
RSP, 234, and GS-3, 406, 414–415.
- 56.
GS-3, 415.
- 57.
LAM, 24. Cf. TWM, 98.
- 58.
WIPP, 172.
- 59.
Strauss, “Notes on Carl Schmitt ,” 98.
- 60.
GS-3, 396.
- 61.
GS-3, 405. On this, I refer the reader to Alberto Ghibellini, “‘Second Cave ’ and Historical Consciousness in Leo Strauss and Gerhard Krüger’s Correspondence,” paper presented at the Yale Political Theory Workshop on March 8, 2017.
- 62.
Strauss, “Review of Julius Ebbinghaus ,” 215; GS-3, 422.
- 63.
GS-3, 440.
- 64.
In GS-3, 417, Strauss even stresses the “problematic” character of that assumption from a Platonic perspective as he understands it: “For every other philosophy presupposes in one way or another that the βιος θεωρητικος is the right βιος [sic] – for Socrates -Plato, however, it is precisely this presupposition that is problematic.” See also NRH, 163.
- 65.
GS-3, 451.
- 66.
Ibid.
- 67.
Aristotle , Politics, 1277a 20–23.
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Ghibellini, A. (2018). Natural Right and Historical Consciousness in Strauss and Krüger’s Exchange. In: Shell, S. (eds) The Strauss-Krüger Correspondence. Recovering Political Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74201-4_8
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