Book Reviews : What Is Political Philosophy? By LEO STRAUSS. (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1959. Pp. 316. $6.00.)

Published date01 September 1960
DOI10.1177/106591296001300349
AuthorLouis Wasserman
Date01 September 1960
Subject MatterArticles
839
conclusions
with
which
I
do
agree,
I
welcome
this
book
as
filling
an
ideological
gap
in
the
hope
that
tough
Professor
Stokes
will
forgive
my
turning
soft
on
him
after
all.
K.
H
SILVERT
Tulane
University
What
Is
Political
Philosophy?
By
LEO
STRAUSS.
(Glencoe,
Ill.:
The
Free
Press,
1959.
Pp.
316.
$6.00.)
Professor
Strauss’s
latest
publication
is
a
collection
of
ten
essays
and
sixteen
shorter
&dquo;appraisals&dquo;
of
other
published
works
in
the
field.
The
period
covered
by
the
essays
is,
roughly,
the
past
decade.
Their
themes
are
diverse,
and
no
more
than
half
of
them
show
any
apparent
sequence.
But
this
proves
to
be
no
short-
coming.
What
connects
them
all
is
the
author’s
demonstrated
persuasion
that
all
the
great
issues
of
political
thought
can
be
measured
against
the
standards
estab-
lished
by
classical
political
philosophy,
i.e.,
the
philosophies
of
Plato
and
Aris-
totle.
But
this,
in
turn,
should
not
be
construed
to
suggest
that
his
arguments
are
narrowly
conceived
or
partisan
in
tone.
As
may
be
expected,
the
present
essays
display
the
same
qualities
of
creative
scholarship,
dialectical
skill,
and
literary
grace
which
have
distinguished
Professor
Strauss’s
other
writings.
If,
as
the
author
laments
in
his
opening
essay,
political
philosophy
is
dead
and
almost
buried,
then
this
book
is
indeed
a
lively
requiem.
He
affirms
not
only
the
need
of
philosophy
in
the
political
realm,
but
equally
the
lasting
pre-
eminence
of
the
classical
tradition
-
despite
all
the
changes
that
history,
science,
and
psychology
have
wrought
-
because,
as
he
says,
Plato
and
Aristotle
ad-
dressed
themselves
to
the
most
fundamental
of
political
questions.
That
ques-
tion
was:
What
form
of
state
is
best
to
develop
the
virtue
of
its
citizens?
With
individual
and
social
virtue
as
its
aim,
the
answer
could
be
given
only
in
moral
terms,
the
expression
of
the
highest
values
to
which
a
given
society
could
aspire.
For
Plato
in
particular,
these
values
were
of
transcendent
character
and
of
uni-
versal
validity,
not
the
shifting
conventions
of
each
generation.
The
debasement
of
this
classical
tradition
began - as
Strauss
traces
the
process
-
with
Machiavelli’s
doctrine
of
political
amorality;
it
continued
with
Hobbes,
who
gave
primacy
to
political
order
rather
than
to
natural
virtue,
and
who
made
the
state
itself
the
creater
of
morality.
Locke
fares
but
little
better
in
the
judgment
-
in
place
of
moral
virtue
as
the
goal,
he
substituted
the
freedom
to
acquire
tangible
and
intangible
property.
Rousseau
was
concerned
with
natural
justice,
but
he
derived
it
from
an
ambiguous
and
hazardous
general
will.
With
Strauss
it is
clearly
of
the
greatest
importance
whether
a
particular
value
is
placed
first
or
second.
The
&dquo;good
society&dquo;
(i.e.,
a
society
ruled
by
the
&dquo;best&dquo;)
may
have
been
assumed
as
an
object
of
all
the
above
philosophies,
but
only
in
the
classical
tradition
was
it
defined
as
the
essential
purpose
of
the
state
and
guided
by
a
set
of
enduring
moral
values.
Strauss
sees
the
more
recent
evidences
of
modernism
in
political
thought
as
having
brought
something
like
nihilism
to
contemporary
society.
Positivism,
which
exalts
the
scientific
method
as
the
only
true
path
to
knowledge,
insists

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