A Thinker's Progress.("Leo Strauss: The Early Writings, 1921-1932")

Leo Strauss: The Early Writings, 1921-1932, translated and edited by Michael Zank (SUNY, 238 pp., $22.95)

The achievement of Leo Strauss has in recent years begun to be generally recognized even by those who did not have the privilege of studying with him or with his students. In 1959, Willmoore Kendall identified Strauss as "the great teacher of political philosophy, not of our time alone, but of any time since Machiavelli"; the rest of the world is starting to catch up with Kendall's assessment.

Over the past 15 years some 20 books have been written on Strauss. The most striking feature of this mini-explosion of scholarship is the sheer range of positions attributed to him. Given that Strauss has been portrayed as almost everything from a pious Jew to a closet Nietzschean, one could be forgiven for believing that all that can be said about him with confidence is that he was not a Communist, an advocate of German imperialism, or a Christian fundamentalist. Though much of this recent scholarship is of dubious value, the increased attention to Strauss has had the positive result of making accessible many hitherto uncollected Strauss writings, some unpublished ones, and his correspondence with such leading contemporaries as Gershom Scholem and Alexandre Kojeve. Much of the credit belongs to the monumental editorial labors of Heinrich Meier, who has been editing the German edition of Strauss's "collected writings" (three large volumes, so far).

Unfortunately, a project similar in scope to Meier's has not yet been undertaken in English; there have, however, been more modest efforts, to which Michael Zank's new translation of Strauss's early writings is a valuable addition. Zank's volume is "intended as a contribution to the study of the origins of the political philosophy of Leo Strauss," and it accomplishes that task. Zank places at the reader's disposal the young Strauss's passionate advocacy of political Zionism and his early confrontations with Spinoza, consideration of whom helped lead Strauss to formulate his teaching on "the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns."

Zank's lengthy introduction, however, does Strauss -- and the reader -- a disservice. He attempts to discover an essential continuity ththroughout Strauss's work, and in doing so he occasionally crosses the bounds of the plausible. To take the most important example: In 1932, Strauss wrote of a "change of orientation" that enabled him to overcome "the premise, sanctioned by powerful prejudices, that a return to pre-modern philosophy was impossible" and made him "ever more attentive to the manner in which heterodox thinkers of earlier ages wrote their books." Zank suggests that this famous change of orientation is more apparent than real: "While the phase of reorientation is characterized by a withdrawal from political participation for the sake of retrieving . . . the Platonic tradition, [Strauss's] earliest essays are permeated by the no less Platonic hope that Zionism might afford one of those rare moments when the philosopher might be king. To put it somewhat paradoxically, then: If there is a turn in the writings of the early Strauss, it is one from Plato to Plato."

But, in fact, one looks in vain in Strauss's writings of the 1920s for the name Plato. Furthermore, political Zionism was by its own account emphatically hard-headed; it sought not a perfectly just political order, but merely one in which the Jewish people could live in a state concretely no different from any other decent state. And as for the "Platonic hope" for the actualization of philosophic rule, it suffices to quote from Strauss's The City and Man: "The just city is not possible because of the philosophers' unwillingness to rule."

Zank's errors extend beyond this attempt at harmonizing Strauss's work. He asserts, for example, that "as a political philosopher" in the early 1930s, "Strauss cannot deny the right of the German 'national uprising'" then being led by the Nazis; but this assertion is simply untrue. In this respect there is no difference between the young Strauss and the one from the 1950s, ...