On Tyranny by Leo Strauss; Victor Gourevitch; Michael S. RothReview by: Steven B. SmithPolitical Theory, Vol. 20, No. 4 (Nov., 1992), pp. 690-693Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/191976 .

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BOOKS IN REVIEW

ON TYRANNY by Leo Strauss. Revised and expanded edition by Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth. New York: Free Press, 1991. Pp. xxii, 336, $14.95 (paper).

The republication of On Tyranny marks a significant event. The volume consists of Xenophon's Hiero along with Leo Strauss's critical commentary first published in 1948; also included are a new translation of Alexandre Kojeve's "Tyranny and Wisdom" published originally in 1954 and Strauss's "Restatement." In addition, the volume contains for the first time a translation of the extant correspondence between Strauss and Kojeve spanning a period of over thirty years. This debate by two of the acknowledged masters of modern thought has already established itself as a classic of political analysis. This new edition with a useful introductory essay and notes by the editors will make possible a revaluation of this epic confrontation in the light of recent theoretical and historical developments.

For readers unfamiliar with the debate, the book sets Strauss against Kojeve (Kozhevnikoff), a Russian emigre Hegelian whose lectures on the Phenomenology of Mind in Paris during the 1930s were to shape the thought of such a diverse group as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Raymond Aron, George Bataille, and Jacques Lacan. It was during this period that Strauss first met Kojeve upon which the two established a friendship that would last until Kojeve's death in 1968. While Strauss emigrated to America and became a central figure in the revival of the study of political philosophy, Kojeve went on to become a high functionary for the newly established European Economic Community where he helped to establish economic policy. One could speculate whether their philosophical orientations dictated their choice of careers or whether their careers dictated their philosophies. Be that as it may, in addition to this debate with Strauss, Kojeve is best known for his Introduction a la lecture de Hegel, a posthumously published "histoire raisonnere" of classical philosophy, a book on Kant, and a recently released study of law entitled Esquisse d'une phenomenologie du droit.

On Tyranny contains an embarrassment of riches. Its themes range from the role of intellectuals in politics and the relation between theory and

POLITICALTHEORY, Vol. 20 No. 4, November 1992 690-706 ? 1992 Sage Publications, Inc.

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BOOKS IN REVIEW 691

practice to the classless society and the "end of history," to name but a few. (The book is itself the profound source underlying the recent furor raised by Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man.) The book considers the nature and limits of tyranny as "a danger coeval with political life" (p. 22). It asks whether this danger is better understood by the forms of analysis of classical antiquity or by the varieties of modem philosophy. The underlying theme is nothing less than "the elementary and unobtrusive conditions of human freedom" (p. 27).

The pretext for this debate grew out of a seemingly obscure source. Xenophon's Hiero takes the form of a dialogue between the poet Simonides and Hiero, the tyrant of Syracuse, who of late has become disenchanted with the burdens of political life. Strauss uses the dialogue to show that the exercise of political power must of necessity be at odds with the philosophical life while at the same time showing how the philosopher can offer some practical instruction to tyrants on how to make their rule less odious to their subjects. The question that the Hiero asks us to consider is whether a rational tyranny or "utopia" is either desirable or feasible.

So much for preliminaries. For Kojeve, it is the Hegelian desire for "recognition" that is the deepest well spring of human behavior (pp. 143-47). All persons desire recognition and are prepared to claim it through conflict and struggle if necessary. For philosophers, this recognition is achieved mainly through the adoption or "actualization" of their ideas in the political world. The philosopher always serves a political role that aims at the education of leading or potential statesmen or tyrants (Kojeve uses the terms synonymously; pp. 162-63).

Strauss begins from virtually the opposite premise, namely, that the phi- losopher as such as indifferent to recognition from others (pp. 203-4). The desire for recognition can only detract from the philosopher's "singleness of purpose" which is precisely the quest for knowledge of the "eternal order." More to the point, Strauss doubts that the desire for recognition is truly the fundamental passion that Kojeve believes. Neither classical nor biblical morality, he suggests, encouraged men to seek universal recognition. It is only modern philosophy based on the idea of the "conquest of nature" that has enflamed such ambitions (pp. 27, 178). Strauss traces modern philosophy back to Machiavelli and Hobbes, but he agrees with Kojeve that it was Hegel who gave the desire for recognition its perfected form. His critique is worth quoting:

Syntheses effect miracles. Kojeve's or Hegel's synthesis of classical and Biblical morality effects the miracle of producing an amazingly lax morality out of two moralities

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692 POLITICAL THEORY / November 1992

both of which made very strict demands on self-resttaint.... Hegel's teaching is much more sophisticated than Hobbes', but it is as much a construction as the latter. Both doctrines construct human society by starting from the untrue assumption that man as man is thinkable as a being that lacks awareness of sacred restraints or as a being that is guided by nothing but a desire for recognition. (Pp. 191-92)

Their respective points of departure clearly determine their conclusions regarding the relation between philosophy and politics. For Kojeve, the con- flict between philosophy and politics is necessarily a "tragic" one (p. 166), whereas for Strauss it is so far from being tragic that it is the precondition for the very survival of philosophy (Pp. 205-6). The philosopher qua philoso- pher can never feel truly at home in politics, not even in the rational state, but only insofar as he is content to regard politics sub specie aeternitatis. Kojeve responds that the philosopher as understood by Strauss cannot verify his knowledge. Insulated from the world, cloistered in his "garden," the philosopher can be no more certain of what he knows than can a lunatic or paranoid (pp. 158-59). To this taunt, Strauss replies that not certainty but an awareness of "the fundamental and comprehensive problems" is the phi- losopher's goal. The philosopher is a skeptic or "zetetic" in the original sense, one who prefers an awareness of the problematic character of all knowledge to an ersatz sense of certainty (p. 196). Strauss appeals to the philosopher's "self-admiration," which is akin to the "good conscience," and does not require the confirmation of others to which Kojeve asks whether Torquemada or Dzerzhinski suffered from "bad consciences" (p. 255).

Whether one regards the human situation as constituted by a desire for recognition or an awareness of sacred restraints carries very different moral and political implications. For Kojeve, recognition is finally possible only in the "universal and homogeneous state," that is, the classless society (pp. 172- 73, 262). He alludes to Stalin and Mao as having instituted such regimes, although Salazar's Portugal also serves as an example. What Xenophon and the ancients considered utterly utopian has become for us "an almost com- monplace reality" (p. 138). For Strauss, however, the reality of the classless society is identical with the final tyranny from which there is no escape. He alludes to Nietzsche's doctrine of the "last man" to describe the citizens of Kojeve's end state (p. 208). Strauss retums again to Nietzsche when he suggests that far from satisfying human nature, Kojeve's end state would eventually generate as its antithesis a "nihilistic revolution" unenlightened by any positive purpose or goal. Rather than deploring this prospect, Strauss claimed to find this abstract negation preferable to the indefinite continuation of the "inhuman end" (p. 209).

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BOOKS IN REVIEW 693

After weighing the evidence, who is right? Recent historical experience would appear to vindicate Strauss. The overthrow of communist tyrannies in the former USSR and elsewhere appears to testify that such regimes have not and indeed cannot provide for the kind of universal recognition that Kojeve deemed desirable. Yet this same fact is now being viewed as the cause of a new "end of history" doctrine, celebrated this time under the banner of liberalism, democracy, and human rights. This appears to me at best prema- ture. The repudiation of communism is a necessary but scarcely a sufficient reason for celebrating a new birth of freedom. In this matter, I take the side of Edmund Burke. "The effect of liberty to individuals," Burke wrote, "is, that they may do what they please. We ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations."

A word ought also to be said about the Strauss-Kojeve correspondence appended to On Tyranny. These letters provide an example of that rarest of human phenomena, a genuinely philosophical friendship. Whether they are discussing Hegel, Hobbes, or the esoteric dimensions of Plato, the letters breathe a kind of passion and candor possible only between true friends. They are also full of delicious gossip and personal judgments that often border on the libelous. Eric Weil is described as "an idle chatterer," Alexandre Koyre as "completely dotty," and Karl Jaspers as "a well-intentioned North-German Protestant Pastor full of unction and earnestness even in sexual matters." Only Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jacob Klein are accorded full citizenship in Strauss's and Kojeve's own "republic of letters."

The final letter from Kojeve to Strauss bears special comment. Dated March 29, 1962, Kojeve describes an invited lecture he had given at the College Philosophique. While his early Hegel lectures had attracted barely a dozen students, more than 300 persons were now in attendance. The result was "terrible." Despite his best efforts to be "as paradoxical and shocking as possible," Kojeve reports that "everything was quietly taken down" and "no one thought of protesting." The views that had made him an enfant terrible thirty years earlier had now transformed him into a thoroughly conventional and respectable academic philosopher, "a kind of Heinrich Rickert." "All this in order to tell you that I am becoming more and more 'platonic,"' he wrote to Strauss. "One should address the few, not the many." It appears that by the end of his life, the mighty Hegelian who had once embraced Stalinism and the policies of forced collectivization had become a "Straussian."

-Steven B. Smith Yale University

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