Politics & Culture
Allan Bloom and
Straussian Alienation
By Claes G. Ryn
The reaction of putative conservatives to the publication of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind
in 1987 was symptomatic of deep intellectual confusion. They treated
the book as a defense of the American political tradition and the values
of Western civilization—as a work of conservative thought. Some of
these conservatives may have based their assessment only on excerpts
from the book in which Bloom criticized spineless academic
administrators and the drug and rock culture, but not even these
sections were a clear indication of conservatism. Sentiments of this
kind could have been expressed by people ranging from moderate liberals
to communists and reactionaries. Although some on the left attacked the
book, it was very different from its reputation among supposed
conservatives. Curiously, it did not make them suspicious that a book by
one of their own should receive an extraordinary amount of attention
and be treated with high respect in places where conservative ideas were
ordinarily disdained.
When Modern Age invited this writer to contribute to a symposium on The Closing of the American Mind,
I tried to show that it was not a defense of the traditional American
mind with its classical, Christian, and British lineage and resonances,
but was largely a defense of the Enlightenment mind.1
What Bloom bewailed was that the Enlightenment mind, which he rather
loosely and arbitrarily equated with the American mind, was closing.
That mind was being threatened, he argued, by the more extreme
radicalism in American universities and elsewhere that had earlier
manifested itself in the New Left and counterculture of the late 1960s
and early ’70s. According to Bloom, this extremism had roots in certain
European, especially German, intellectual currents. In typical
Straussian fashion, Bloom obfuscated by implying a connection between
the Enlightenment he favored and the so-called “Ancients,” as he interpreted them. For instance, he treated Socrates as a kind of pre-Enlightenment figure.
None of this should have surprised anyone. As a Straussian, Bloom had
long sought to appropriate certain iconic historical figures, giving
them new intellectual profiles that would support his intellectual
agenda. His likes and dislikes were revealing. His fondness for
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, if nothing else, should have tipped conservatives
off to his philosophical leanings. Though a complex thinker not easily
classified, Rousseau had long been seen as a major influence on
leftist-revolutionary movements and as a theorist of so-called
totalitarian democracy. He inspired the French Jacobins, including the
notorious Robespierre.2 But no—when The Closing of the American Mind enjoyed its great success, conservatives wanted to celebrate a supposed breakthrough for conservatism.
Bloom’s book actually took its place within an old, large and
familiar genre, that of turning America and its origins, especially the
so-called Founding, into something different from what they actually
were. Intellectuals uncomfortable with America’s traditional culture had
long tried to recast and replace it. Because Americans were, when these
efforts first got underway, strongly attached to that culture and had a
particular fondness for the Constitution as the political essence of
the American tradition, attacking these head-on was not a very promising
way of weaning Americans off traditional allegiances. Instead, these
intellectuals adopted a strategy of deception and, in some cases,
perhaps self-deception. Great energy went into persuading Americans that
America’s pedigree was not what it had seemed to be. America, they
asserted, was not an outgrowth and continuation of Western classical and
Christian civilization, as mediated by British culture, and affected
also by more recent ideas. America represented a departure from or
outright rejection of the bad old days of Europe. America was based not
on a rich, complex, slowly evolved European heritage, but on abstract,
ahistorical principles.
A prime example of this genre was Louis Hartz’s 1955 book The Liberal Tradition in America,
which declared that America is quintessentially liberal and that John
Locke is pervasively paradigmatic for America. All the more thoroughly
to sever America’s connection to the old world, Hartz assumed an
ahistorical, secularized, “enlightened,” quasi-capitalist Locke. This
Locke suited his intellectual purpose better than the actual Locke,
whose ideas had a connection, however tenuous, with medieval thought.
Bloom’s book, like those of other Straussians, was yet another example
of the effort to give America origins that would make it more appealing
and favorable to people of enlightened views.
Whole ideologies and mythologies have grown up that draw attention
away from America’s actual past and make Americans of an older type, the
WASPs in particular, feel defensive and even out of place, certainly
not entitled to any special status. The desire to have America be
something different from its historical past and to make it perhaps also
more palatable to an aspiring new elite is probably most evident and
explicit in Bloom’s fellow Straussian Harry Jaffa. Jaffa has made a
career of asserting that America must not, repeat, not, be understood as
owing anything of importance to an old historical heritage. It must be
seen as born out of a radical break with the past and as based on
abstract principles of an essentially Lockean cast—Lockeanism understood
concomitantly as a departure from earlier thought. The American
Founding, Jaffa asserts, “represented the most radical break with
tradition . . . that the world had seen . . . . [T]he founders
understood themselves to be revolutionaries, and to celebrate the
American Founding is therefore to celebrate revolution.” The American
Revolution “embodied the greatest attempt at innovation that human
history had recorded.” This revolution was somewhat mild, Jaffa
concedes, but belongs with “subsequent revolutions in France, Russia,
China, Cuba or elsewhere.”3 There is in such statements not
so much as a hint of the deep roots of the American rebellion in the old
English tradition of constitutionalism and resistance to tyranny. That a
particular heritage—classical, Christian, and British—decisively shaped
American society and politics is for Jaffa evidently a distasteful
notion. Far from being conservative of an ancient inheritance, Jaffa
wants to be rid of America’s actual past—a goal that he has
pursued by arguing among the historically uneducated for his notion of
an ahistorical, radical, revolutionary Founding. Bloom’s view of America
is similar. In The Closing of the American Mind he even asserts that the American Revolution was fought for the same principles as the French Revolution.4
Putative American conservatives still sensed nothing particularly wrong
with the book. They seemed to have been already affected by such a view
of America and to have but a passing familiarity with the history of
their country.5
Analogously, Bloom contends that Plato, whose iconic status and
authority he would like to invoke on behalf of his own beliefs, is
markedly different from how a long tradition of classicist scholarship
has understood him. Contrary to all appearances, Plato is not scornful
of democracy and democratic man. He is a democrat in disguise. Bloom
writes about The Republic: “Socrates the philosopher desires democracy. He is actually engaged in a defense of democracy against its enemies.”6
Bloom similarly tries to claim the old normative idea of “nature,”
which appeared among the Greeks and eventually became central to the
natural law tradition. To recast this idea and infuse it with content
more pleasing to him, Bloom draws in part on Rousseau’s primitivistic
notion of “nature,” which is at the core of Rousseau’s wholesale attack
on traditional Western civilization, especially its moral-spiritual
heritage. Rousseau constructed the sharpest possible contrast between
nature and tradition. Really to respect nature is to be hostile to tradition.
Leo Strauss, the teacher of Bloom and Jaffa, is not enamored of
Rousseau or Locke, but his basic understanding of philosophy radiates
distrust of tradition. He insists that real philosophizing is
incompatible with according tradition respect, except in the limited
sense that the philosophers, whose real thoughts are always a threat to
tradition, may have to pay lip service to it to protect themselves
against resentment. The philosopher is not concerned with history,
Strauss contends, but with the universal, which is, in his estimation,
by definition ahistorical, abstract. To philosophize, Strauss insists,
is to disavow the traditional, the conventional, the ancestral. To
philosophize is to consider “universal or abstract principles” and
always has “a revolutionary, disturbing, unsettling effect.” There is
that idea again: What has evolved historically imperils goodness and
truth. Strauss wants it understood that philosophy “tends to prevent men
from wholeheartedly identifying themselves with, or accepting the
social order that fate has allotted them. It tends to alienate them from their place on the earth.”7
To philosophize is to become more or less alienated from the
surrounding society. It seems for Strauss unacceptable that tradition at
its best—as a kind of summing up of the findings of generations—might
actually help intellectually and otherwise limited human beings to find
universality and to achieve an intrinsically worthwhile existence.
Joseph Cropsey, with whom Strauss co-edited a famous reader in political
philosophy, echoes this prejudice against tradition. Expounding a
Straussian conception of nature, Cropsey writes: “The conventional is antithetical
to the natural.” When conservatism respects convention and tradition,
Cropsey adds, “it can be said to abjure nature and reason.”8
Strauss and the Straussians thus go to great lengths denying any
connection between philosophy and the universal, on the one hand, and
tradition and the historical, on the other. To regard tradition as in
any sense authoritative is to be guilty of the philosophical and moral
offense of “historicism.” Claiming yet again the support of an iconic
figure for his thinking, Bloom writes in The Closing of the American Mind
with specific reference to what Aristotle is supposed to have believed:
“The essence of philosophy is the abandonment of all authority in favor
of individual human reason.”9 Another ancient thinker is
here found to have anticipated the modern notion of reason that Bloom
favors. His Aristotle looks very different from the Aristotle who
emphasized the social and political nature of man and philosophized
about politics on the basis of a comparative historical study of
regimes.
Whence this Straussian unwillingness to consider that philosophy and
morality might have something to gain from weighing historical evidence,
most generally the experience of the human race and, more particularly,
the experience of classical and Christian civilization? Whence this
assumption that tradition must contradict and threaten philosophy?
Christian civilization fostered a rather different attitude towards
tradition. It negated any sharp dichotomy between
philosophy/universality and history. A sense of preserving and
transmitting a heritage is integral to Christianity. Remembrance
of sacred events and how they inspired the Christian community is
central to the Christian intellectual and moral sensibility.
Particularly in its more Catholic and Orthodox strains, Christianity has
regarded tradition as one of its pillars. For Thomas Aquinas, natural
law, which he regards as accessible not only to Christians, tends to
coincide with custom.10 One of the obvious reasons for taking
a sympathetic interest in history is that, according to Christianity,
the Universal and the historical became one. The Word became flesh. In
keeping with the notion that the divine was incarnated, Christians have
been sensitive to history being more than an amorphous flux. They have
looked for and tried to realize as much as possible of life’s higher
meaning not in the intellectual abstract, but in concrete, historical
action. Though it has not been unencumbered by rationalistic leanings,
Christianity greatly modified the over-intellectualization of the
moral-spiritual life and the philosophical ahistoricism to which the
ancient Greeks, especially Plato, were prone. “By their fruits ye shall
know them” means to Christians that the spirit manifests itself first of
all in things concretely done. In its encounter with more abstract,
rationalistic modern thinking, Christian civilization generated a
heightened awareness of the higher aspects and potentialities of man’s
historical existence, a more acute, self-consciously historical view of
life and of how, despite the chronic perversities and limits of human
life, the universal might find expression in the particular. Edmund
Burke strongly defends tradition, not, as Strauss clumsily alleges, as a
normative alternative to moral universality, but, on the
contrary, as a source of guidance in the search for universality. Burke
regards “the general bank and capital of nations and of ages,” as
enlivened by what he calls a “moral imagination,” as an indispensable
support for individually weak and imperfect human beings in trying to
discern and realize true universality.11 Christian thinkers
have not been alone in concluding that, as Burke argues, a purely
abstract universality is an artificial and potentially tyrannical
construct.12
It is hardly implausible to think that humanity has something to
learn from its own experience and that it might over time evolve an
improved sense of what makes life worth living. Why, then, is it so
important to the mentioned Straussians to portray any such philosophical
leanings as the product of an inferior, less than philosophical
mind-set? Why their strong desire to pit what they call philosophy
against tradition? Why must philosophy be conceived as inseparable from
alienation from society and even as inducing a revolutionary
disposition? Why are the Straussians not content with something like
Burke’s admission that tradition is but a guide and nowhere the final
word and with his recognition that in a stagnant society tradition may
become stultifying or perverse. It would appear that the Straussian
discomfort with tradition does not have merely philosophical origins. It
suggests a psychological predisposition to view a society’s culture as
inevitably threatening or hostile. It is as if the mentioned Straussians
thought that only by disparaging and otherwise undermining the ways of
the society in which they find themselves could they hope to achieve the
influence or status to which they feel entitled. One wonders if, for
these Straussians, the “philosopher” with his allegedly noble alienation
and disdain for tradition is in effect a representative and spearhead
for a rising elite that is trying to replace another.
Members of the Frankfurt School are known for their attacks on
traditional authority and the “authoritarian personality,” just as Marx
and Lenin before them exuded alienation and revolutionary sentiment.
Because of the reputation of the Straussians, it might seem far-fetched
to regard them as radicals in any sense, but, whatever the best way to
describe them, they do in their disparagement of tradition resemble the
open, unqualified left. Their ostensible defense of universality or
“natural right” seems to connect them with more traditional views, but,
as has been shown, they define universality or natural right abstractly
and in contradistinction to historical particularity and
individuality. That universality and history might be synthesized, as
assumed, for example, in the Christian notion of incarnation, is for
them unacceptable, even inconceivable. In the Straussian conception, the
universal must be empty of specific, historical content. Having
dismissed Burkean “historicism” in Natural Right and History and associated it with the pernicious “moderns,” Strauss aligns himself with the “ancients,” as he understands them.
He writes: “The quarrel between the ancients and the moderns concerns
eventually, and perhaps even from the beginning, the status of
‘individuality.’”13 To attribute to individuality or
particularity any kind of higher significance or authority is to have
succumbed to “historicism,” than which there is no greater philosophical
failing. It must here be conceded that the ancients, especially Plato,
did have an undeveloped sense of the intimate connection between
particularity and universality, but Strauss introduced his dichotomy
long after philosophy had broached and extensively discussed the
possibility of a synthesis of the two. His dichotomy is therefore more
deliberate and radical than anything that the ancients could have
advocated.
The criticism of “historicism” is one of Strauss’s most well-known
and celebrated philosophical themes. He goes to great lengths to
discredit respect for tradition and historical particularity. Though
this is not the place to explore the topic, one might ask if Strauss was
able to reconcile these philosophical efforts with his strong
identification with Jewish culture and Zionism. Philosophical
consistency would require that his “anti-historicism” be directed also
against the tradition with which he identifies and would mean that he is
undermining his own heritage. If his anti-historicism is addressed only
to general audiences and directed only against competing traditions, it
would not be a philosophical stance but a merely rhetorical one, part
of a political strategy. A posture of that sort might have seemed
appropriate when in the Germany of his youth Strauss was a member of a
Zionist alternative to the Hitler youth.
It is a much-debated question whether, for leading Straussians, a
defense of “universality” or “natural right” is merely theoretical
window-dressing, hiding a kind of Nietzschean nihilism and despair or at
least a deep ambivalence regarding the existence of moral universality.
Be that as it may, the Straussians, including Bloom, insist that
universality or nature must be understood as purely abstract. Their
fondness for ahistorical, anti-traditional “principles” becomes hard to
tell apart from that of the French Jacobins. These philosophical
inclinations are loaded with practical ramifications. It is relevant
that abstractly conceived principles typically express an impatience
with the complexities of historical existence and a desire to dominate
by decree. People of such “principle” tend to ignore historical
circumstances and see moral and other issues in black or white.
But if Bloom and the Straussians associate philosophy with alienation
and abstraction, how to explain that so many American Christians,
particularly Roman Catholics, have been so attracted to their thinking?
One obvious and partial explanation is that Leo Strauss and the
Straussians presented themselves as defenders of the ancients, which
seemed to accord with long-standing Western intellectual tradition.
There are strains of Straussian thought—including a form of elitism and
an apparent concern for a higher, common good in preference to narrowly
economic interest—that appear to overlap with that heritage. The
elements of Straussianism that most clash with the classical and
Christian traditions were also typically formulated in indirect,
shrouded ways that kept philosophically unsophisticated traditionalist
readers from recoiling. The Straussian method of turning respected
historical figures into something different from what they were was
sufficiently convoluted not to arouse suspicion among such Christians.
From the point of view of attracting followers among Catholics,
Straussian thinking had the advantage that its anti-historicism and
abstractionism could appeal to and connect with the weakest aspect of
the natural law tradition, its propensity for abstract rationalism.
Catholics may in addition have detected that, almost from the beginning,
leading Straussians had a special and growing influence that was
unexpected in supposedly conservative intellectuals. The Straussians
were attacked by leftists and rigid positivists, but they simultaneously
had some kind of rapport with portions of the academic establishment,
and they had access to growing financial resources. Even as Catholics
sensed that pleasing the leaders of this school might bring a career
advantage, the smarter and better-educated among them must have felt
some considerable intellectual and moral-spiritual discomfort. But, to
the extent that they sensed peril, they seem to have lacked the
philosophical tools to articulate just what it was and to have been, in
any case, able to suppress their unease.
It should be added that some Catholics may have been attracted to the
Straussian disparagement of tradition because of similar developments
within their church. As became evident in connection with the Second
Vatican Council, many progressive Catholics sharply challenged Church
authority and argued that the Church had relied overly on tradition and
resisted modernity too strongly.
There is yet another possible explanation for the apparent paradox
that Catholic intellectuals should have been attracted to Straussian
alienation and anti-“historicism.” Could it be that as outsiders of a
sort—as the descendants of recent arrivals in Protestant America—some
Catholics found the Straussian discomfort with tradition in general and
with old America and its elites in particular subtly appealing? Even if
they did not need to feel greatly alienated from an essentially
Christian America, they might have carried with them from their families
stories or echoes, however faded, of the slights and indignities
suffered at the hands of WASP America or have harbored just a vague
general sense of inferiority. Did some Irish-Americans prefer to ignore
America’s English origins?
The Straussians refer with apparent admiration to a few iconic
American figures, whom they like to call the Founders. To give them that
name is to imply that America was a new creation, that it did not
really exist until the Declaration and the Constitution were written.
The Founders, as presented by leading Straussians, have no deep,
substantial cultural roots. They are not portrayed as having the thick
historical identity of essentially British Christians living on the East
Coast of America. The Straussians like to present them instead with
reference to specific ideas that they supposedly held—sometimes just
single phrases they used—which are typically taken out of historical
context, that is, made as abstract as possible, or taken out of their
context in a particular document. It seems that Straussian interpreters
have been concerned to empty these figures of their cultural
distinctiveness, specifically, of their WASPishness, and to turn them
into mere embodiments of or stand-ins for abstract, formulaic notions.
Their iconic status attaches, then, not to their substantive minds,
characters, and imaginations, including their historically formed ideas,
but to ahistorical, putatively universal “principles.”
Is it frivolous to speculate that descendants of the late arrivals in
America, not least the Catholic so-called ethnics, found it somehow
pleasing to think with Hartz, Strauss, Jaffa, Bloom, and many others
that America did not really originate with quasi-aristocratic WASPs but
with abstract principles espoused by culturally almost vacuous,
non-descript Founders? If America is thought of as an ideological cause
rather than as the creative development of a thickly constituted and
ancient historical heritage, then whoever embraces the same principles
is as entitled to feeling American as any WASP. To measure up, you do
not have to conform to the snobbish expectations of a WASP elite, but
only need to repeat certain formulas. People with a social chip on their
shoulder might, in other words, have felt a kinship with Straussian
theorists who clothed alienation from the old Americans in a
noble-sounding advocacy of universal principles.
To the extent that Catholic ethnics more or less consciously joined
with the mentioned Straussians in an alliance to diminish and dislodge
the WASPs, they seem not to have worried that, despite their vast
superiority in numbers, they would be the distinctly junior partners or
that Straussian alienation and anti-historicism would undermine their
own beliefs and general culture.
Perhaps the prime example of a prominent Catholic who rather
uncritically and unsuspectingly promoted Straussianism was William F.
Buckley, Jr., a central figure in the shaping of the American post-World
War II conservative movement. As the founder and editor of National Review
he could promote ideas and perspectives in a sustained manner. He could
make reputations. As a gifted intellectual and polemicist he became a
conservative celebrity. His well-advertised Catholicism helped pull
aspiring young Catholic intellectuals in the direction that he
recommended, and he did much to assist the Straussian cause. It is
illustrative of Buckley’s role in that regard that in 1988 he let
Charles R. Kesler, a disciple of Harry Jaffa, co-edit with him a revised
edition of his 1970 anthology Modern American Conservative Thought in the Twentieth Century. The new edition, called Keeping the Tablets,
gave great prominence to Straussians, especially Leo Strauss and Harry
Jaffa. Much of that writing, including the ideas of Harry Jaffa cited
above, could not be construed as conservative in any meaningful sense.
Though intellectually agile, William F. Buckley, Jr., was not prone to
philosophy in the stricter sense. He cared less about philosophical
veracity, precision, and consistency than about creating a broad
intellectual political alliance. Trying to decide whether a thinker
belonged to the good guys or the bad guys, Buckley would go more by the
person’s stand on certain public policy issues than by the person’s
basic view of human nature and society. That Harry Jaffa supported Barry
Goldwater for the presidency seemed under Buckley’s loose,
public-policy-oriented definition of conservatism sufficient proof that
Jaffa was on the right side. Yet apparent similarities among thinkers on
political issues may be quite superficial, indeed, conceal
all-important differences. Supporters, for example, of “the free
market,” “limited government,” or “liberty” may mean greatly different
things by these terms and have sharply contrasting worldviews. Really to
sort out questions of this type requires careful philosophical
analysis, a need that becomes all the greater when trying to distinguish
different meanings of such terms as “natural right,” “reason,”
“universality,” “history,” and “tradition.” For this kind of scrutiny
and discernment Buckley was not well equipped. He was one of many
supposedly conservative intellectuals who made do with a kind of
near-philosophy or pretend-philosophy. He did not realize that failing
to address seemingly “fine” philosophical points was a major obstacle to
understanding what was what and that this deficiency was bound to
produce vast intellectual confusion and have large practical
consequences.
Historians will have to assess the extent to which non-philosophical
factors, including social prejudice and ambition, accounted for some of
the susceptibility of Catholic intellectuals to Straussian alienation
and anti-“historicism.” A basic lack of philosophical and historical
education may have been more important. In the case of the leading
Straussians, a psychology of alienation appears to have been a major
factor. If we take seriously Leo Strauss’s comments on the nature of
philosophy, philosophizing that is not shot through by alienation is for
him not really philosophy. Yet philosophers who do not approach ideas
from within a psychology of social discomfort or ambition need not see
any necessary connection between philosophy and alienation from the
culture in which they live. They do of course recognize that the
philosophical intellect is never the captive of tradition and must clash
with stale and rigid convention and that the philosopher must often be
critical of old or merely prevalent beliefs, but this is an elementary,
virtually self-evident disposition. It does not produce an entire
philosophical mind-set, a preoccupation with undermining an existing
culture and its elites and protecting yourself against the inevitable
backlash. Conceiving of philosophy as having a conspiratorial dimension
looks rather idiosyncratic and is out of place in thinkers who speak in
the name of high principles, “nature,” “universality,” or “natural
right.”
Alienation from traditional American and Western society often surfaces in The Closing of the American Mind.
It is palpable in Bloom’s comments on the American South, a region that
happens to have been especially respectful of tradition. He disdains
its championing of the principle of aristocracy. Southern defenses of
local community and protests against leveling and money-grubbing he
dismisses as the special pleading of “snobs” and “malcontents.” Yet
among Southerners, too, the Straussians made recruits, though not of the
more doctrinaire, enthusiastic sort.
Bloom’s 1987 triumph was not due to his having written a profound
analysis of the state of America. He had produced another barely veiled
attack on traditional America while at the same time providing a defense
of the new American establishment that is replacing the disoriented,
decadent WASPs. Like Bloom, parts of the new establishment did not want
to yield to even more radical forces, such as members of the New Left
and the counterculture. Now that we are on the inside, they seemed to
say, it is only necessary to make sure that extremists do not undermine
our gains or that the WASPs will not stage a comeback.
One of today’s leading literary scholars, the Harvard “new
historicist” Stephen Greenblatt, feels no need to conceal his animus
against what remains of the old Western world, specifically
Christianity. It is not a part of his intellectual strategy to appeal to
some of the conservative elements of the abdicating, essentially
Christian order. He openly celebrates the destruction of traditional
beliefs and structures. At first blush, Bloom might seem the antithesis
of Greenblatt. After all, Bloom criticizes historicism, and
Greenblatt approves it. But Greenblatt’s historicism is very different
from Burke’s. The latter is indistinguishable from a defense of
traditional Western civilization as well as of universality, though
understood in a partly new way. Despite Bloom’s disdain for tradition
and traditional elites, self-described conservatives thought that he
might be one of them. Bloom is indeed much less obvious in his attacks
on old America and old Western civilization than Greenblatt, and he is
not as radical as the latter in what he wants to jettison. He is also
protective of aspects of the “modern,” Enlightenment mind. Yet Bloom shares with Greenblatt a deep prejudice, evident to any attentive reader of The Closing of the American Mind,
against traditional Western civilization. The obfuscation that he and
other Straussians have employed—notably that of using iconic Western and
American figures to give themselves a distinguished and to
traditionalists reassuring pedigree—proved sufficient to disarm and
deceive philosophically semi-literate readers. Straussianism in general
is most certainly not without merit, but the failure of so-called
conservatives to discern its element of cultural radicalism and
intellectual intrigue revealed a great need for philosophical and
historical education.
Notes
1. Claes G. Ryn, “Universality or Uniformity?,” Modern Age, Vol. 32, No. 1 (1988).
2. On Rousseau’s seminal contributions to totalitarianism, see, for example, J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy
(New York: Praeger, 1960). On the incompatibility of Rousseau’s notion
of democracy with American constitutional republicanism, see Claes G.
Ryn, Democracy and the Ethical Life, 2nd rev. exp. ed. (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1990).
3. Harry V. Jaffa, “Equality as a Conservative Principle,” in William F. Buckley, Jr., and Charles R. Kesler, eds. Keeping the Tablets: Modern American Conservative Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 86.
4. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 158.
5. For an historically based examination of the frame of mind that
made the American colonists favor separation from England, see Joseph
Baldacchino, “The Unraveling of American Constitutionalism: From
Customary Law to Permanent Innovation,” Humanitas, Vol. XVIII, Nos. 1 & 2 (2005), http://www.nhinet.org/baldacchino18-1&2.pdf.
6. Allan Bloom, Interpretive Essay, in The Republic of Plato, Transl., with Notes and an Interpretive Essay, by Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 421.
7. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 13-14 (emphasis added).
8. Joseph Cropsey, Political Philosophy and the Issues of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 117-18 (emphasis added in the first quotation).
9. Bloom, Closing, 253.
10. See Thomas Aquinas, Treatise on Law, esp. Qu. 97.
11. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 76.
12. For an in-depth philosophical discussion of the possible
synthesis of universality and particularity, as conceived in a
“value-centered historicism,” and for a discussion of the weakness and
danger of abstract conceptions of universality, see Claes G. Ryn, A Common Human Ground: Universality and Particularity in a Multicultural World (Columbia and London: The University of Missouri Press, 2003).
13. Strauss, Natural Right, 323.
Claes G. Ryn, professor of politics at
the Catholic University of America, is chairman of the National
Humanities Institute and editor of Humanitas. Another version of
this article appears in Humanitas 25:1-2.
