Natural Right and History: The Question of Strauss and the Postliberals

Conservatives will often talk about the point at which “everything went wrong” — for some, this is 2020, the year everything went woke. Many others will diagnose LBJ’s Great Society as the disaster defining our generation. For Leo Strauss, the German-American political philosopher, the West took a turn for the worse when Machiavelli sat down to write in the early 16th century.

Strauss’s thought, which is illuminated in his 1953 book Natural Right and History, is derived from his extensive genealogy of Western political thought. Natural Right presents Strauss’s attempt to recover the premodern conception of natural right, and with it, the entirety of reason, and the project (or “quest,” as he prefers) of political philosophy. Those Straussians who accept the thesis that modernity, brought about by Niccolò Machiavelli, is fundamentally flawed, are beginning to shape the future of American politics.

I recently began my own quest to read much of Strauss’s work. Partly motivated by my interest in natural law, and partly in defiance of several of my friends who hate Strauss and the Straussians, my quest led me toward Natural Right in an attempt to grasp his grand thesis and its grander implications. For, you see, Strauss is hidden between the lines of all of neoconservatism and postliberalism. Few other political theorists of the 20th century have impacted the conservative politics of the 21st century to the degree that Strauss has. The specter of Strauss and his intellectual heirs lingers behind the worldviews of JD Vance, Peter Thiel, and some of the most prominent conservative academics of our generation.

In Natural Right and History, Strauss begins with an analysis of the two threats to the tradition of political philosophy. In a passionate refutation of the first threat, Strauss tackles Max Weber’s scientism, which sought to separate brute facts from the values that guided them. As the celebrated conservative Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield notes in Claremont Review of Books, concern over the domination of science unfettered by value judgments was deeply relevant to Strauss’s era. The atomic bomb and the brutal science of the Nazi and Imperial Japanese regimes resurfaced lingering questions of whether science should be decoupled from fundamental ethical judgments.

Unfortunately, the 21st century is no more free from the assumption that empirical knowledge is the only valid form of knowledge. Neither are we liberated from the second threat to natural right: historicism, the idea that cultural and moral values are mere products of their historical circumstances. If the academy of Strauss was plagued by the idea that all truth is contingent to a specific historical moment, modern America is downright infected with it. Those who tear down statues of the Founding Fathers, those who dismiss personal agency in favor of predetermined circumstance, and those who outright deny the existence of universal, timeless truths would do well to consider the natural end of historicism, which is moral relativism, as Strauss correctly identifies.

His analysis of modernity’s break with classical tradition is particularly intriguing. For Strauss, the ancients and the moderns differentiated themselves in their use of nature and the natural as the guiding point. It was Machiavelli who lowered the goal of politics from the naturally ideal to the practically achievable; later thinkers like Hobbes and Locke accepted this more pessimistic view of politics.

This fundamental shift ushered in ideas of individualism, liberalism, and capitalism. However, early modern thinkers also shifted the focus of politics from one’s noble duty to one’s mere rights, from freedom as a means to freedom as the ultimate end, from a civilization captivated by its role and purpose to one that is no longer convinced of its own prior adherence to progress, reason, and science. The Western man has lost faith in his ability to rationally determine how to live his life, and increasingly believes that all paths forward are relative and therefore meaningless.

The difficulty in reading Strauss lies in whether or not one accepts his thesis. For a conservative, rejecting Strauss’s diagnosis of the fatal flaw in Western civilization means that living in an America that continues to lose faith in itself is an acceptable proposition. It implies satisfaction with living in a Western world that believes that everything is merely conventional and relative. It projects confidence that liberal democracy is the greatest and best regime for today.

Lending credence to Strauss’s thesis, however, means that one needs to address the question of how to respond to the crisis of modernity. The natural end of Strauss’s critique is a call to return to the premodern conception of politics. Luckily enough, the New Right, which emerged under Trump’s first term, is recruiting. Though they may be loose and undefined, they are more than just a reactionary movement. Guided by intellectuals, most notably Notre Dame’s Patrick Deneen and Claremont’s Michael Anton, postliberals are convinced that the only way to save the West is to return to the deeply illiberal and undemocratic politics of the ancients.

As a conservative, I find myself stuck. Strauss’ theory is charming, and originally unassuming. Yet as I continue on my quest, I’m increasingly cautious of the pathways that lead to dangerous regime change. 

Perhaps this is the most important reason to read Strauss more than 70 years later; to understand the tech right, the Catholic integralists, the Euroskeptics, and those who spurn fusionism, the neoliberal consensus, and the globalists. Conservatives will increasingly find their politics to be defined by their relation to the New Right. The task at hand is to be prepared for the future.