What do you think?
Rate this book
Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue
Carl Schmitt was the most famous and controversial defender of political theology in the twentieth century. But in his best-known work, The Concept of the Political , issued in 1927, 1932, and 1933, political considerations led him to conceal the dependence of his political theory on his faith in divine revelation. In 1932 Leo Strauss published a critical review of Concept that initiated an extremely subtle exchange between Schmitt and Strauss regarding Schmitt’s critique of liberalism. Although Schmitt never answered Strauss publicly, in the third edition of his book he changed a number of passages in response to Strauss’s criticisms. Now, in this elegant translation by J. Harvey Lomax, Heinrich Meier shows us what the remarkable dialogue between Schmitt and Strauss reveals about the development of these two seminal thinkers.
Meier contends that their exchange only ostensibly revolves around liberalism. At its heart, their “hidden dialogue” explores the fundamental conflict between political theology and political philosophy, between revelation and reasonand ultimately, the vital question of how human beings ought to live their lives.
“Heinrich Meier’s treatment of Schmitt’s writings is morally analytical without moralizing, a remarkable feat in view of Schmitt’s past. He wishes to understand what Schmitt was after rather than to dismiss him out of hand or bowdlerize his thoughts for contemporary political purposes.”—Mark Lilla, New York Review of Books
Meier contends that their exchange only ostensibly revolves around liberalism. At its heart, their “hidden dialogue” explores the fundamental conflict between political theology and political philosophy, between revelation and reasonand ultimately, the vital question of how human beings ought to live their lives.
“Heinrich Meier’s treatment of Schmitt’s writings is morally analytical without moralizing, a remarkable feat in view of Schmitt’s past. He wishes to understand what Schmitt was after rather than to dismiss him out of hand or bowdlerize his thoughts for contemporary political purposes.”—Mark Lilla, New York Review of Books
156 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1995
18 people are currently reading
394 people want to read
About the author
Heinrich Meier
45 books9 followersHeinrich Meier is professor of philosophy at the universities of Munich and Chicago and heads the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Foundation.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
January 27, 2022
"Top 10 Anime Crossovers You Won't Believe Actually Happened"
October 19, 2023
Der Spiegel
Intellectuals
04.08.2003
4th August 2003
The Leo-conservatives
For the past few weeks, US President George W. Bush has been surrounded by a secretive circle of advisors and public relations experts, giving rise to all kinds of conspiracy theories and debates.
It's been said that the group's idol is German Jewish philosopher Leo Strauss.
The German philosopher who has suddenly become surprisingly popular in the United States was never a leftist, but rather a conservative to the core. We are not talking about Theodor W. Adorno, who would be celebrating his 100th birthday this year, or Herbert Marcuse, whose remains were recently transferred from New Haven, Connecticut to Berlin, but a contemporary of these two founders of the Frankfurt School who has received relatively little attention from German intellectuals: Leo Strauss. Like his contemporaries, Strauss was also a German Jew. He also emigrated to the United States and spent the rest of his life there. This fall will mark the thirtieth anniversary of his death.
Leo Strauss was a remarkable exception among those who were forced to leave Hitler's Germany. Unlike his fellow expatriates, this soft-spoken, diminutive deep thinker quickly obtained a professorship at the major and highly regarded University of Chicago. He was also the only German emigrant to establish a philosophy movement that became widespread in the United States, a movement whose influence extends to within today's inner circles of power in Washington.
What is the story with his students, the "Straussians," who have so often been invoked and described since the end of the Iraq war that they have almost become an intellectual legend? They are viewed as a group of neo-conservative conspirators, as a small, elite order guiding the Bush administration - and when its path becomes crooked, providing it with a good conscience. They can be found among the justices of the Supreme Court, and they work at both the White House and the Pentagon.
Although most of them have learned their particular way of thinking from Strauss, they are more power-conscious than the master was. They want to change and not just interpret America.
The Washington branch of the "Straussians" recently met at a barbecue in a Washington park in July, as it does every year, to play baseball and chat about the past and present. More than 60 members of the inner and outer circles of the administration attended the event. Paul Wolfowitz, the Bush administration's hawkish idea man, was there, as was Abram Shulsky, a Pentagon intelligence expert who co-authored a book with Francis Fukuyama.
William Kristol, publisher of the "Weekly Standard," a paper with a circulation of only 60,000 but with considerable influence in Washington, was there, and so was Leon Kass, whom the President has commissioned to develop guidelines for stem cell research. They too are students of Leo Strauss.
One would think that a family barbecue on a sunny day would be a rather mundane and innocuous event. However, just about everything the "Straussians" do these days is a general target of suspicion. Concerns and fears are being leveled by the left, and they represent an attempt to break the cultural hegemony of the "Neocons," which began with George W. Bush' presidency and has infiltrated a patriotic America since September 11, 2001.
Their central complaint is that although the Strauss clique may be part of a secondary level of power, the ideology it endorses - of the special role America is to play in the 21st century - is one on which the actions of Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Bush are based.
Wolfowitz and other Straussians are part of an avant-garde of the conservative revolution that essentially despises the idea of a liberal democracy.
In all of this, the spider in the web is a small, eccentric professor from Weimar Germany, one who despised the Enlightenment and viewed democratic liberalism as a sinful political movement.
The debate on the pages of The New York Times and The New Yorker has long since spread to Germany. In this country, Strauss was barely acknowledged while he was still alive (he died in 1973). It is only in recent years that Heinrich Meier, director of the Siemens Foundation in Munich, has taken it upon himself to publish and philosophically classify Strauss' body of work.
Meier's own studies on Strauss, particularly on his relationship with Catholic constitutional scholar Carl Schmitt, have suddenly become current as a result of the debate surrounding the intellectual basis of Bushism.
But where is Strauss' place in the history of German philosophy? In an article in "Die Zeit," Berlin historian Heinrich August Winkler has drawn far-reaching conclusions from the fact that Strauss maintained friendly relations with Carl Schmitt, a critic of parliamentarism and spiritual precursor of the Nazis. According to Winkler, certain parallels exist between the "conservative revolution" prior to Hitler's rise to power and the current situation in the United States.
In Winkler's view, the Straussians have "found in Bush Junior what Carl Schmitt ultimately sought in vain: 'access to the ruler'."
Nonetheless, it is not quite that easy to determine whether Leo Strauss is truly deserving of his reputation as the demonized 'Godfather of the Bush Mafia.'
According to his own strict standards, Strauss was not a true philosopher, since he did not leave behind a systematic body of work.
His strength lay in the interpretation of the great philosophical literature ranging from Plato, through Socrates, Spinoza, Machiavelli and Hobbes, to Martin Heidegger. In his early years, Strauss' thoughts were focused on theology, and only later on political philosophy, on the 'question of what is right.'
Strauss was about as well-educated as a thorough German professor can imagine. Because he wrote clearly and understandably, his books, though written in the German style of the pre-war era, are still quite readable today.
His daughter Jenny, a professor of Greek and Roman poetry at the University of Virginia, has a photograph of the family house in the Hessian town of Kirchhain (near Marburg) where her father, born in 1899, grew up.
The photograph shows a simple, stately house without the ornaments of the Gruenderzeit. The Strauss family was involved in the grain trade, and also raised chickens and poultry.
Its talented son Leo transferred this modest straightforwardness to his philosophy. In spite of what must have been countless setbacks in the life of a German Jew, a man who served in World War I, emigrated in 1932 and experienced his greatest years in America, Strauss remained true to his roots in developing his philosophy.
In 1921, he earns a doctorate under Ernst Cassirer, and he continues his search for authority and orientation. He initially rejects Neokantianism, the predominant prewar philosophy, and is dissatisfied with Max Weber's belief in the value-freedom of scientific judgements.
But then he meets the man whom this generation of young philosophers, which also includes Herbert Marcuse, Karl Lowith and Günther Anders, considers to be the deepest thinker of its time: Martin Heidegger.
Like Heidegger, Strauss drew a radical consequence from the experiences of World War I and the constant threat to the Weimar Republic: In his view, this served as historical proof that the Enlightenment, with its positive view of human nature and its faith in progress, was an illusion.
He also believed that faith in a liberal democracy as the governmental and social order of the future was invalid. And Strauss remained true to this theory until his death.
However, what displeased Strauss about Heidegger's principal work, Being and Time (1927) was its existentialism, which abandoned any justification of morality and worshipped 'death as God' (Strauss), making the philosopher from Todtnauberg susceptible to the National Socialists nihilistic yearning for death.
As a result of his conflict with Heidegger, however, Strauss developed a slightly eccentric theory, which was received with surprising enthusiasm many years later in America.
Religion is the opium of the people, but it is an indispensable opium.
As his theory goes, philosophers following in Nietzsche's footsteps could devote themselves to the question of how the death of God and the renunciation of religion impacts thought and being. But without the inner cohesiveness faith provides, states could not exist.
For this reason, according to Strauss, religion serves as a binding agent in a stable social order. It is, admittedly, the opium of the people, but it is also an indispensable opium.
n Strauss' view, liberal democracies such as the Weimar Republic are not viable in the long term, since they do not offer their citizens any religious and moral footings.
The practical consequence of this philosophy is fatal.
According to its tenets, the elites have the right and even the obligation to manipulate the truth.
Just as Plato recommends, they can take refuge in 'pious lies' and in selective use of the truth.
It is precisely because of these fundamental elements of a political theory Strauss represented throughout his life that he is accused, in today's America, of having used the Nazis to study the methods of mass manipulation.
And 'Straussians', such as Wolfowitz and other proponents of the Iraq war, are now suspected of simply having used the Strauss' political principles for their own purposes. When seen in this light, the partly fictitious reasons for the war against Saddam Hussein represent the philosophical heritage of an emigrant from Germany.
A conspiracy theory is developing in which Strauss is portrayed as the puppet master and the Bush administration as his puppets.
The anti-Semitic overtones of this theory are obvious - Strauss as a 'Nazi Jew', particularly as many of his students bear Jewish names: Paul Wolfowitz, Abram Shulsky, Harvey Mansfield, William Kristol.
Strauss himself was more interested in antiquity than in the present.
Hans Jonas, who was his friend since the 1920s, writes in his Memoirs that Strauss was "an unbelievably unworldly and anxious person."
In fact, he was deeply pessimistic and tended to believe that history could only bring decline and decay.
Paradoxically, this pessimist was exceptionally fortunate at decisive points in his life. He left Germany in 1932, before Hitler's rise to power.
Carl Schmitt, whose study on the differences between friend and foe as the origin of the political was favorably reviewed by Strauss, helped him obtain a fellowship with the Rockefeller Foundation.
Strauss first went to France and later to England, where he completed his Hobbes book, which remains respected today.
Finally, in 1938, just before the outbreak of World War II, Strauss arrived in America.
He spent his first winter at the New York "University in Exile," as the New School for Social Research was called, because it had become a magnet for Jewish refugees from countries throughout Europe: Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, Karl Lowith, Arnold Brecht, Adolph Löwe, Kurt Riezler - 180 intellectual giants in total. They sarcastically referred to themselves as "Hitler's gift to the United States."
Although he was a complete stranger to America, Strauss did not encounter any insurmountable difficulties in adjusting to his new home.
Although he spoke many languages, his English remained slightly accented to the end.
nd is if it were a deceit of Hegelian reason - of all things, luck was to remain on his side: In 1948, he was offered a position to teach philosophy in Chicago.
At that time, Chicago was an even more preeminent university than it is today. It was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, whose money had been spurned by the elite east coast universities.
Moreover, the university's autocratic president, Robert M. Hutchins, had a knack for attracting talented academics.
These factors led to three professors teaching at Chicago after the war who were to exert tremendous influence on the elites through the present day.
There was Hans J. Morgenthau, who was also an emigrant from Germany. Unlike Strauss, however, he was oriented toward the theoretical permeation of reality.
He achieved his greatest impact with his theses on a new realistic foreign policy, which served as the basis of an non-illusory stance against the Soviet Union during the Cold War and soon became government policy.
Morgenthau's most teachable pupil was an emigrant from Fürth, who managed to become National Security Advisor and Secretary of State under Richard Nixon: Henry Kissinger.
His version of Realpolitik - coexistence, even with autocrats or dictators, provided this advances one's own interests - has only now been dismantled by the neoconservatives.
In their view, it is insufficiently moral and too closely aligned with the status quo.
The second Chicago professor whose stature has endured was Milton Friedman, who in 1976 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for his theory of monetarism. He was a student of August von Hayek, who also taught at Chicago in 1950 but, to von Hayek's great embitterment, was overshadowed by John Maynard Keynes and his theory of state intervention in times of market crisis.
Friedman was doubly blessed. He was both a popular university professor and a sought-after advisor, consulted by presidents ranging from Johnson through Nixon to Reagan. He recommended that the state withdraw from the market, which led to the theory of supply-side economic policy, which holds that capitalism develops most efficiently when profit and consumption grow as a result of tax cuts.
This risky economic policy, which quickly produced a national deficit under Reagan, has been taken up again by the president currently in office - and with the same consequences.
The third professor is Leo Strauss, who possessed neither Morgenthau's sense of the present nor Friedman's ability to interact with the powerful.
It seems paradoxical that he has managed to significantly influence politics and politicians after his death.
After all, he was a conservative who did not believe things could take a turn for the better.
He remained a Weimarer at heart, steadfastly refusing to bestow his blessing on liberal democracy, and directing all his skepticism against its pluralism and relativism.
In spite of the fact that America was different, he was unable to trust this project of the modern era.
All Leo Strauss really wanted to be was a teacher who introduces his students to the philosophical world of the ancients.
As he saw it, one can study the eternal energy fields in which human beings and states stand at all times, not least of which the present: What is justice, what is the good life, what difference does the state make, where are the limits of our knowledge?
In the present, Strauss argued, these questions pose themselves in the maelstrom of events and remain difficult to comprehend. But in the great writings of the past, they are addressed in terms of pure culture.
The disadvantage of this argument, however, is that the professor was satisfied with considering the problems because he did not believe that they could be solved.
However, a few of his students felt a greater urge to take action. They wanted to understand in order to act. They progressed from European theory to practical application in America.
Strauss' seminars and lectures soon acquired cult-like status, and even attracted Catholic priests and representatives of the Chicago establishment.
To ensure that his growing audiences could hear him speak, the professor had a microphone attached to his body, which at that time must have involved a major procedure before each lecture. During the 1960s, his students began recording Strauss' lectures, which always took place on Wednesday afternoons at 3:30.
This tremendous success created jealous rivals. They found fault in the fact that a professor of political philosophy preferred to lecture on antiquity without drawing any conclusions for the present - for the bipolar world, the Cold War, the new nuclear weapons.
Eternal truths, preferably derived from Xenophon, Socrates, Plato?
Refutation of the modern age through refutation of Hobbes?
For the first time, those buzzwords were mentioned which still cling to Strauss in the current debate: nihilism, elitism, esotericism.
"A neoconservative is a left-winger who has been ambushed by reality."
His students, however, were fascinated by the world he showed them. Soon the best and the brightest of their classes flooded his lectures, many of them also Jews.
Two of the first Straussians, Walter Berns and Werner Dannhauser, who also became professors, say that they were shaped by the war, often with left-leaning tendencies, and were readers of Marx and Freud. They say that the man from Weimar taught them how to think and to respect the great philosophers.
As detached from the world Strauss was, he became all the more topical in the mid-sixties when neoconservatism was born.
The true godfathers of the neocons can be found in the Kristol family. Irving Kristol coined the classic sentence: "A neoconservative is a left-winger who has been ambushed by reality."
Gertrude Himmelfarb, Kristol's wife, discovered Strauss in 1950.
She wrote the classic polemic 'One Nation, Two Cultures.'
She not only criticizes the loss of civility and the Protestant work ethic, permissive morality and the sexual revolution, but also sees all of these things as the consequence of unfettered liberalism in a democratic America.
This is Strauss in pure culture, but turned upside-down by cultural warriors.
Irving Kristol completed this reversal by taking up Strauss' idea that religion is indispensable in guaranteeing the existence of a state order.
Kristol, a brilliant agitator in the role of a journalist, knew America better - at least 150 million more or less religious people, primarily Catholics or Protestants, a mundane form of piety that was organized into countless sects and represented a political power base for the conservatively reborn Republicans.
An original element of the neoconservative ideology was the discovery that the politically decisive battles in America are waged around cultural values.
The Left had propagated that the private sphere is political.
The Neocons are taking them at their word.
The state, along with Milton Friedman, should stay out of the economy, but not the bedrooms of its citizens.
.......
See Part II
Intellectuals
04.08.2003
4th August 2003
The Leo-conservatives
For the past few weeks, US President George W. Bush has been surrounded by a secretive circle of advisors and public relations experts, giving rise to all kinds of conspiracy theories and debates.
It's been said that the group's idol is German Jewish philosopher Leo Strauss.
The German philosopher who has suddenly become surprisingly popular in the United States was never a leftist, but rather a conservative to the core. We are not talking about Theodor W. Adorno, who would be celebrating his 100th birthday this year, or Herbert Marcuse, whose remains were recently transferred from New Haven, Connecticut to Berlin, but a contemporary of these two founders of the Frankfurt School who has received relatively little attention from German intellectuals: Leo Strauss. Like his contemporaries, Strauss was also a German Jew. He also emigrated to the United States and spent the rest of his life there. This fall will mark the thirtieth anniversary of his death.
Leo Strauss was a remarkable exception among those who were forced to leave Hitler's Germany. Unlike his fellow expatriates, this soft-spoken, diminutive deep thinker quickly obtained a professorship at the major and highly regarded University of Chicago. He was also the only German emigrant to establish a philosophy movement that became widespread in the United States, a movement whose influence extends to within today's inner circles of power in Washington.
What is the story with his students, the "Straussians," who have so often been invoked and described since the end of the Iraq war that they have almost become an intellectual legend? They are viewed as a group of neo-conservative conspirators, as a small, elite order guiding the Bush administration - and when its path becomes crooked, providing it with a good conscience. They can be found among the justices of the Supreme Court, and they work at both the White House and the Pentagon.
Although most of them have learned their particular way of thinking from Strauss, they are more power-conscious than the master was. They want to change and not just interpret America.
The Washington branch of the "Straussians" recently met at a barbecue in a Washington park in July, as it does every year, to play baseball and chat about the past and present. More than 60 members of the inner and outer circles of the administration attended the event. Paul Wolfowitz, the Bush administration's hawkish idea man, was there, as was Abram Shulsky, a Pentagon intelligence expert who co-authored a book with Francis Fukuyama.
William Kristol, publisher of the "Weekly Standard," a paper with a circulation of only 60,000 but with considerable influence in Washington, was there, and so was Leon Kass, whom the President has commissioned to develop guidelines for stem cell research. They too are students of Leo Strauss.
One would think that a family barbecue on a sunny day would be a rather mundane and innocuous event. However, just about everything the "Straussians" do these days is a general target of suspicion. Concerns and fears are being leveled by the left, and they represent an attempt to break the cultural hegemony of the "Neocons," which began with George W. Bush' presidency and has infiltrated a patriotic America since September 11, 2001.
Their central complaint is that although the Strauss clique may be part of a secondary level of power, the ideology it endorses - of the special role America is to play in the 21st century - is one on which the actions of Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Bush are based.
Wolfowitz and other Straussians are part of an avant-garde of the conservative revolution that essentially despises the idea of a liberal democracy.
In all of this, the spider in the web is a small, eccentric professor from Weimar Germany, one who despised the Enlightenment and viewed democratic liberalism as a sinful political movement.
The debate on the pages of The New York Times and The New Yorker has long since spread to Germany. In this country, Strauss was barely acknowledged while he was still alive (he died in 1973). It is only in recent years that Heinrich Meier, director of the Siemens Foundation in Munich, has taken it upon himself to publish and philosophically classify Strauss' body of work.
Meier's own studies on Strauss, particularly on his relationship with Catholic constitutional scholar Carl Schmitt, have suddenly become current as a result of the debate surrounding the intellectual basis of Bushism.
But where is Strauss' place in the history of German philosophy? In an article in "Die Zeit," Berlin historian Heinrich August Winkler has drawn far-reaching conclusions from the fact that Strauss maintained friendly relations with Carl Schmitt, a critic of parliamentarism and spiritual precursor of the Nazis. According to Winkler, certain parallels exist between the "conservative revolution" prior to Hitler's rise to power and the current situation in the United States.
In Winkler's view, the Straussians have "found in Bush Junior what Carl Schmitt ultimately sought in vain: 'access to the ruler'."
Nonetheless, it is not quite that easy to determine whether Leo Strauss is truly deserving of his reputation as the demonized 'Godfather of the Bush Mafia.'
According to his own strict standards, Strauss was not a true philosopher, since he did not leave behind a systematic body of work.
His strength lay in the interpretation of the great philosophical literature ranging from Plato, through Socrates, Spinoza, Machiavelli and Hobbes, to Martin Heidegger. In his early years, Strauss' thoughts were focused on theology, and only later on political philosophy, on the 'question of what is right.'
Strauss was about as well-educated as a thorough German professor can imagine. Because he wrote clearly and understandably, his books, though written in the German style of the pre-war era, are still quite readable today.
His daughter Jenny, a professor of Greek and Roman poetry at the University of Virginia, has a photograph of the family house in the Hessian town of Kirchhain (near Marburg) where her father, born in 1899, grew up.
The photograph shows a simple, stately house without the ornaments of the Gruenderzeit. The Strauss family was involved in the grain trade, and also raised chickens and poultry.
Its talented son Leo transferred this modest straightforwardness to his philosophy. In spite of what must have been countless setbacks in the life of a German Jew, a man who served in World War I, emigrated in 1932 and experienced his greatest years in America, Strauss remained true to his roots in developing his philosophy.
In 1921, he earns a doctorate under Ernst Cassirer, and he continues his search for authority and orientation. He initially rejects Neokantianism, the predominant prewar philosophy, and is dissatisfied with Max Weber's belief in the value-freedom of scientific judgements.
But then he meets the man whom this generation of young philosophers, which also includes Herbert Marcuse, Karl Lowith and Günther Anders, considers to be the deepest thinker of its time: Martin Heidegger.
Like Heidegger, Strauss drew a radical consequence from the experiences of World War I and the constant threat to the Weimar Republic: In his view, this served as historical proof that the Enlightenment, with its positive view of human nature and its faith in progress, was an illusion.
He also believed that faith in a liberal democracy as the governmental and social order of the future was invalid. And Strauss remained true to this theory until his death.
However, what displeased Strauss about Heidegger's principal work, Being and Time (1927) was its existentialism, which abandoned any justification of morality and worshipped 'death as God' (Strauss), making the philosopher from Todtnauberg susceptible to the National Socialists nihilistic yearning for death.
As a result of his conflict with Heidegger, however, Strauss developed a slightly eccentric theory, which was received with surprising enthusiasm many years later in America.
Religion is the opium of the people, but it is an indispensable opium.
As his theory goes, philosophers following in Nietzsche's footsteps could devote themselves to the question of how the death of God and the renunciation of religion impacts thought and being. But without the inner cohesiveness faith provides, states could not exist.
For this reason, according to Strauss, religion serves as a binding agent in a stable social order. It is, admittedly, the opium of the people, but it is also an indispensable opium.
n Strauss' view, liberal democracies such as the Weimar Republic are not viable in the long term, since they do not offer their citizens any religious and moral footings.
The practical consequence of this philosophy is fatal.
According to its tenets, the elites have the right and even the obligation to manipulate the truth.
Just as Plato recommends, they can take refuge in 'pious lies' and in selective use of the truth.
It is precisely because of these fundamental elements of a political theory Strauss represented throughout his life that he is accused, in today's America, of having used the Nazis to study the methods of mass manipulation.
And 'Straussians', such as Wolfowitz and other proponents of the Iraq war, are now suspected of simply having used the Strauss' political principles for their own purposes. When seen in this light, the partly fictitious reasons for the war against Saddam Hussein represent the philosophical heritage of an emigrant from Germany.
A conspiracy theory is developing in which Strauss is portrayed as the puppet master and the Bush administration as his puppets.
The anti-Semitic overtones of this theory are obvious - Strauss as a 'Nazi Jew', particularly as many of his students bear Jewish names: Paul Wolfowitz, Abram Shulsky, Harvey Mansfield, William Kristol.
Strauss himself was more interested in antiquity than in the present.
Hans Jonas, who was his friend since the 1920s, writes in his Memoirs that Strauss was "an unbelievably unworldly and anxious person."
In fact, he was deeply pessimistic and tended to believe that history could only bring decline and decay.
Paradoxically, this pessimist was exceptionally fortunate at decisive points in his life. He left Germany in 1932, before Hitler's rise to power.
Carl Schmitt, whose study on the differences between friend and foe as the origin of the political was favorably reviewed by Strauss, helped him obtain a fellowship with the Rockefeller Foundation.
Strauss first went to France and later to England, where he completed his Hobbes book, which remains respected today.
Finally, in 1938, just before the outbreak of World War II, Strauss arrived in America.
He spent his first winter at the New York "University in Exile," as the New School for Social Research was called, because it had become a magnet for Jewish refugees from countries throughout Europe: Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, Karl Lowith, Arnold Brecht, Adolph Löwe, Kurt Riezler - 180 intellectual giants in total. They sarcastically referred to themselves as "Hitler's gift to the United States."
Although he was a complete stranger to America, Strauss did not encounter any insurmountable difficulties in adjusting to his new home.
Although he spoke many languages, his English remained slightly accented to the end.
nd is if it were a deceit of Hegelian reason - of all things, luck was to remain on his side: In 1948, he was offered a position to teach philosophy in Chicago.
At that time, Chicago was an even more preeminent university than it is today. It was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, whose money had been spurned by the elite east coast universities.
Moreover, the university's autocratic president, Robert M. Hutchins, had a knack for attracting talented academics.
These factors led to three professors teaching at Chicago after the war who were to exert tremendous influence on the elites through the present day.
There was Hans J. Morgenthau, who was also an emigrant from Germany. Unlike Strauss, however, he was oriented toward the theoretical permeation of reality.
He achieved his greatest impact with his theses on a new realistic foreign policy, which served as the basis of an non-illusory stance against the Soviet Union during the Cold War and soon became government policy.
Morgenthau's most teachable pupil was an emigrant from Fürth, who managed to become National Security Advisor and Secretary of State under Richard Nixon: Henry Kissinger.
His version of Realpolitik - coexistence, even with autocrats or dictators, provided this advances one's own interests - has only now been dismantled by the neoconservatives.
In their view, it is insufficiently moral and too closely aligned with the status quo.
The second Chicago professor whose stature has endured was Milton Friedman, who in 1976 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for his theory of monetarism. He was a student of August von Hayek, who also taught at Chicago in 1950 but, to von Hayek's great embitterment, was overshadowed by John Maynard Keynes and his theory of state intervention in times of market crisis.
Friedman was doubly blessed. He was both a popular university professor and a sought-after advisor, consulted by presidents ranging from Johnson through Nixon to Reagan. He recommended that the state withdraw from the market, which led to the theory of supply-side economic policy, which holds that capitalism develops most efficiently when profit and consumption grow as a result of tax cuts.
This risky economic policy, which quickly produced a national deficit under Reagan, has been taken up again by the president currently in office - and with the same consequences.
The third professor is Leo Strauss, who possessed neither Morgenthau's sense of the present nor Friedman's ability to interact with the powerful.
It seems paradoxical that he has managed to significantly influence politics and politicians after his death.
After all, he was a conservative who did not believe things could take a turn for the better.
He remained a Weimarer at heart, steadfastly refusing to bestow his blessing on liberal democracy, and directing all his skepticism against its pluralism and relativism.
In spite of the fact that America was different, he was unable to trust this project of the modern era.
All Leo Strauss really wanted to be was a teacher who introduces his students to the philosophical world of the ancients.
As he saw it, one can study the eternal energy fields in which human beings and states stand at all times, not least of which the present: What is justice, what is the good life, what difference does the state make, where are the limits of our knowledge?
In the present, Strauss argued, these questions pose themselves in the maelstrom of events and remain difficult to comprehend. But in the great writings of the past, they are addressed in terms of pure culture.
The disadvantage of this argument, however, is that the professor was satisfied with considering the problems because he did not believe that they could be solved.
However, a few of his students felt a greater urge to take action. They wanted to understand in order to act. They progressed from European theory to practical application in America.
Strauss' seminars and lectures soon acquired cult-like status, and even attracted Catholic priests and representatives of the Chicago establishment.
To ensure that his growing audiences could hear him speak, the professor had a microphone attached to his body, which at that time must have involved a major procedure before each lecture. During the 1960s, his students began recording Strauss' lectures, which always took place on Wednesday afternoons at 3:30.
This tremendous success created jealous rivals. They found fault in the fact that a professor of political philosophy preferred to lecture on antiquity without drawing any conclusions for the present - for the bipolar world, the Cold War, the new nuclear weapons.
Eternal truths, preferably derived from Xenophon, Socrates, Plato?
Refutation of the modern age through refutation of Hobbes?
For the first time, those buzzwords were mentioned which still cling to Strauss in the current debate: nihilism, elitism, esotericism.
"A neoconservative is a left-winger who has been ambushed by reality."
His students, however, were fascinated by the world he showed them. Soon the best and the brightest of their classes flooded his lectures, many of them also Jews.
Two of the first Straussians, Walter Berns and Werner Dannhauser, who also became professors, say that they were shaped by the war, often with left-leaning tendencies, and were readers of Marx and Freud. They say that the man from Weimar taught them how to think and to respect the great philosophers.
As detached from the world Strauss was, he became all the more topical in the mid-sixties when neoconservatism was born.
The true godfathers of the neocons can be found in the Kristol family. Irving Kristol coined the classic sentence: "A neoconservative is a left-winger who has been ambushed by reality."
Gertrude Himmelfarb, Kristol's wife, discovered Strauss in 1950.
She wrote the classic polemic 'One Nation, Two Cultures.'
She not only criticizes the loss of civility and the Protestant work ethic, permissive morality and the sexual revolution, but also sees all of these things as the consequence of unfettered liberalism in a democratic America.
This is Strauss in pure culture, but turned upside-down by cultural warriors.
Irving Kristol completed this reversal by taking up Strauss' idea that religion is indispensable in guaranteeing the existence of a state order.
Kristol, a brilliant agitator in the role of a journalist, knew America better - at least 150 million more or less religious people, primarily Catholics or Protestants, a mundane form of piety that was organized into countless sects and represented a political power base for the conservatively reborn Republicans.
An original element of the neoconservative ideology was the discovery that the politically decisive battles in America are waged around cultural values.
The Left had propagated that the private sphere is political.
The Neocons are taking them at their word.
The state, along with Milton Friedman, should stay out of the economy, but not the bedrooms of its citizens.
.......
See Part II
August 1, 2016
A fascinating insight into Leo Strauss important review of Carl Schmitt's The Concept of the Political. The review was written in 1932. Strauss became an exile from Germany, Schmitt assumed a role as 'Crown Jurist of the Third Reich.' Meier, an expert on Schmitt sheds light on Strauss critique and Schmitt's thesis. At times he is 'over-critical' in the sense that he doesnt do justice to Schmitts opinions as Strauss did. He obviously dislikes Schmitts thesis but could have portrayed it in a clearer light. Th book is a little bit too discursive. I think you come away from it unable to pick up a clear train of thought. Meiers deep knowledge of Schmitt is ultimately what saves it.
December 17, 2024
Heinrich Meier’s Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue is a penetrating and nuanced study of one of the most intriguing and critical intellectual exchanges of the 20th century. In this work, Meier meticulously reconstructs the implicit dialogue between Carl Schmitt, the prominent German jurist and political theorist, and Leo Strauss, the German-Jewish philosopher who would later become an influential figure in American political thought. By analyzing Strauss’s response to Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political (1932) and Schmitt’s subsequent engagement with Strauss’s critique, Meier uncovers a “hidden dialogue” that revolves around foundational questions concerning politics, philosophy, and the theological-political problem.
Meier’s central argument is that the engagement between Schmitt and Strauss—though seemingly brief and indirect—constitutes a profound and consequential intellectual encounter. At its core, this “hidden dialogue” exposes the philosophical stakes underlying Schmitt’s political theology and Strauss’s critique of modernity. Meier demonstrates that Strauss’s response to Schmitt, while ostensibly a commentary on The Concept of the Political, is in fact a rigorous philosophical challenge to Schmitt’s understanding of the nature of politics and the grounds of authority. For Strauss, Schmitt’s political theology remains trapped within modernity’s immanent framework, failing to address the deeper philosophical crisis at the heart of modern political thought.
The book is divided into two main parts. In the first section, Meier reconstructs the historical and intellectual context of Schmitt and Strauss’s encounter, providing readers with a detailed account of their respective positions. Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political defines the political as the distinction between “friend” and “enemy,” a concept grounded in existential decisionism and aimed at resisting liberalism’s depoliticizing tendencies. Schmitt identifies secularization as the defining feature of modernity, arguing that political authority inevitably requires theological concepts transposed into secular form. For Schmitt, the political remains irreducible and inescapable, and any attempt to depoliticize human existence—whether through liberal rationalism or technocratic governance—constitutes a dangerous denial of the political.
Strauss’s critique of Schmitt, articulated in his Notes on Carl Schmitt: The Concept of the Political (1932), emerges as both a profound engagement with Schmitt’s ideas and a challenge to his premises. Strauss agrees with Schmitt’s diagnosis of the crisis of modern liberalism but rejects his solution. According to Strauss, Schmitt’s decisionism lacks a stable foundation, as it presupposes the primacy of the political without offering a justification for its authority. By highlighting Schmitt’s reliance on theology, Strauss forces Schmitt to confront the philosophical insufficiency of his position. For Strauss, the true crisis of modernity lies in the rejection of classical political philosophy and the loss of transcendence as a standard for evaluating political life.
In the second part of the book, Meier explores Schmitt’s later reflections on Strauss’s critique. Schmitt’s Ex Captivitate Salus (1950) and Glossarium (1947–1951) reveal his deep awareness of Strauss’s challenge and his attempt to grapple with it. Meier argues that Schmitt’s acknowledgment of Strauss is both grudging and profound, as it forces Schmitt to recognize the limits of his own political theology. In this way, the dialogue between Schmitt and Strauss remains “hidden” not because it is obscure, but because it operates at the level of implicit philosophical confrontation rather than direct debate.
Meier’s analysis is distinguished by its rigorous scholarship and careful textual exegesis. He brings clarity to a complex and often opaque set of arguments, demonstrating the philosophical stakes of the Schmitt-Strauss encounter. By situating their exchange within the broader context of political theology and the crisis of modernity, Meier underscores the enduring relevance of their dialogue for contemporary political thought. At the same time, Meier remains sensitive to the historical circumstances that shaped Schmitt and Strauss’s intellectual trajectories, particularly the rise of National Socialism and the crisis of liberal democracy in the interwar period.
One of the book’s key strengths lies in its illumination of Strauss’s role as a critic of modernity. Meier convincingly argues that Strauss’s engagement with Schmitt represents a crucial moment in Strauss’s development as a philosopher, as it marks his turn toward classical political philosophy as an antidote to the nihilism of modernity. For Strauss, Schmitt’s political theology is ultimately insufficient because it remains within the horizon of modern immanence, unable to provide a genuinely transcendent foundation for political authority. Meier’s interpretation situates Strauss as both a critic and a corrective to Schmitt, offering readers a deeper understanding of Strauss’s project.
However, the book is not without its challenges. Meier’s dense and philosophically rigorous style may prove demanding for readers unfamiliar with the broader context of Schmitt and Strauss’s thought. Moreover, while Meier’s focus on the philosophical dimensions of the Schmitt-Strauss dialogue is illuminating, it occasionally sidelines the concrete political implications of their ideas. For instance, Schmitt’s role as a jurist under the Nazi regime raises ethical questions that are not fully addressed in Meier’s analysis. Similarly, Strauss’s own complex relationship to liberal democracy—though implicit in Meier’s account—could have been explored more fully.
Despite these limitations, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue remains an essential contribution to the study of political philosophy and intellectual history. Meier’s careful reconstruction of the Schmitt-Strauss encounter sheds new light on their respective projects, highlighting the philosophical tensions that continue to shape debates about authority, modernity, and the role of religion in political life. For scholars of Schmitt, Strauss, and the theological-political problem, Meier’s work offers a profound and indispensable analysis of one of the most significant intellectual exchanges of the 20th century.
In conclusion, Heinrich Meier’s Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue is a masterful work of scholarship that uncovers the philosophical depth of the encounter between two of modernity’s most influential thinkers. By situating Schmitt’s political theology and Strauss’s critique within the broader crisis of modernity, Meier provides readers with a nuanced understanding of their dialogue and its enduring significance. For students of political thought, this book serves as both a critical analysis and a thought-provoking exploration of the limits of politics, authority, and transcendence in the modern age.
GPT
Meier’s central argument is that the engagement between Schmitt and Strauss—though seemingly brief and indirect—constitutes a profound and consequential intellectual encounter. At its core, this “hidden dialogue” exposes the philosophical stakes underlying Schmitt’s political theology and Strauss’s critique of modernity. Meier demonstrates that Strauss’s response to Schmitt, while ostensibly a commentary on The Concept of the Political, is in fact a rigorous philosophical challenge to Schmitt’s understanding of the nature of politics and the grounds of authority. For Strauss, Schmitt’s political theology remains trapped within modernity’s immanent framework, failing to address the deeper philosophical crisis at the heart of modern political thought.
The book is divided into two main parts. In the first section, Meier reconstructs the historical and intellectual context of Schmitt and Strauss’s encounter, providing readers with a detailed account of their respective positions. Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political defines the political as the distinction between “friend” and “enemy,” a concept grounded in existential decisionism and aimed at resisting liberalism’s depoliticizing tendencies. Schmitt identifies secularization as the defining feature of modernity, arguing that political authority inevitably requires theological concepts transposed into secular form. For Schmitt, the political remains irreducible and inescapable, and any attempt to depoliticize human existence—whether through liberal rationalism or technocratic governance—constitutes a dangerous denial of the political.
Strauss’s critique of Schmitt, articulated in his Notes on Carl Schmitt: The Concept of the Political (1932), emerges as both a profound engagement with Schmitt’s ideas and a challenge to his premises. Strauss agrees with Schmitt’s diagnosis of the crisis of modern liberalism but rejects his solution. According to Strauss, Schmitt’s decisionism lacks a stable foundation, as it presupposes the primacy of the political without offering a justification for its authority. By highlighting Schmitt’s reliance on theology, Strauss forces Schmitt to confront the philosophical insufficiency of his position. For Strauss, the true crisis of modernity lies in the rejection of classical political philosophy and the loss of transcendence as a standard for evaluating political life.
In the second part of the book, Meier explores Schmitt’s later reflections on Strauss’s critique. Schmitt’s Ex Captivitate Salus (1950) and Glossarium (1947–1951) reveal his deep awareness of Strauss’s challenge and his attempt to grapple with it. Meier argues that Schmitt’s acknowledgment of Strauss is both grudging and profound, as it forces Schmitt to recognize the limits of his own political theology. In this way, the dialogue between Schmitt and Strauss remains “hidden” not because it is obscure, but because it operates at the level of implicit philosophical confrontation rather than direct debate.
Meier’s analysis is distinguished by its rigorous scholarship and careful textual exegesis. He brings clarity to a complex and often opaque set of arguments, demonstrating the philosophical stakes of the Schmitt-Strauss encounter. By situating their exchange within the broader context of political theology and the crisis of modernity, Meier underscores the enduring relevance of their dialogue for contemporary political thought. At the same time, Meier remains sensitive to the historical circumstances that shaped Schmitt and Strauss’s intellectual trajectories, particularly the rise of National Socialism and the crisis of liberal democracy in the interwar period.
One of the book’s key strengths lies in its illumination of Strauss’s role as a critic of modernity. Meier convincingly argues that Strauss’s engagement with Schmitt represents a crucial moment in Strauss’s development as a philosopher, as it marks his turn toward classical political philosophy as an antidote to the nihilism of modernity. For Strauss, Schmitt’s political theology is ultimately insufficient because it remains within the horizon of modern immanence, unable to provide a genuinely transcendent foundation for political authority. Meier’s interpretation situates Strauss as both a critic and a corrective to Schmitt, offering readers a deeper understanding of Strauss’s project.
However, the book is not without its challenges. Meier’s dense and philosophically rigorous style may prove demanding for readers unfamiliar with the broader context of Schmitt and Strauss’s thought. Moreover, while Meier’s focus on the philosophical dimensions of the Schmitt-Strauss dialogue is illuminating, it occasionally sidelines the concrete political implications of their ideas. For instance, Schmitt’s role as a jurist under the Nazi regime raises ethical questions that are not fully addressed in Meier’s analysis. Similarly, Strauss’s own complex relationship to liberal democracy—though implicit in Meier’s account—could have been explored more fully.
Despite these limitations, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue remains an essential contribution to the study of political philosophy and intellectual history. Meier’s careful reconstruction of the Schmitt-Strauss encounter sheds new light on their respective projects, highlighting the philosophical tensions that continue to shape debates about authority, modernity, and the role of religion in political life. For scholars of Schmitt, Strauss, and the theological-political problem, Meier’s work offers a profound and indispensable analysis of one of the most significant intellectual exchanges of the 20th century.
In conclusion, Heinrich Meier’s Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue is a masterful work of scholarship that uncovers the philosophical depth of the encounter between two of modernity’s most influential thinkers. By situating Schmitt’s political theology and Strauss’s critique within the broader crisis of modernity, Meier provides readers with a nuanced understanding of their dialogue and its enduring significance. For students of political thought, this book serves as both a critical analysis and a thought-provoking exploration of the limits of politics, authority, and transcendence in the modern age.
GPT
November 6, 2023
Schmitt affirms the political as such as a ‘field’ omnipresent in terrestrial history at least since the time of Cain and Abel. However, that the infamous political theologian time and time again stresses the need to affirm the political raises the question of whether the political itself is powerless to make its own sovereign presence known and felt against those who attempt to either limit it or erase it entirely from the face of the earth. A neutral reading of Schmitt’s project to restore the dignity of the concept of the political reveals Schmitt’s own thinly veiled fears that the attempt to limit the political through, for instance, relegating it to a domain of its own, has been carried out with terrifying success at the turn of the 20th century. Setting aside the question of whether these fears are in fact justified, we may reasonably speculate that they prompted Schmitt to take up the mantle of the political theologian and come to the defense of the political. But Schmitt could not have engaged in such militancy at empirical, theoretical and metatheoretical levels if he did not already have faith that according to its own inner logic the political, both as a phenomenon and as a Concept, resists the human race’s attempt at making it fade into irrelevance. At the risk of indulging in vulgar Hegelianism, we may suppose, with Schmitt, that concerned political theologians could not possibly come to the aid of the political and could not prevent the political from bleeding to death under a thousand technologizations and neutralizations at the hands of well intentioned liberals unless the former did not enjoy its own independent reality and 'obstinacy' (here, the Marxist slogan of communism as a ‘real movement’ comes to mind). In fact, it is one of the meta-theoretical definitions of liberalism that prevails in the 20th century that liberalism denies precisely such an independent reality of the political over and against atomistic individuals who engage in political affairs (and, according to Schmitt, at its own peril). This is to suggest that for Schmitt, a complete liquidation of the political can never come to pass. But again, if such a fate can never come to pass, if the regime of the last men can never be definitively established on earth despite the best efforts by liberals and technocrats, then Schmitt’s fears about the potential disappearance of the political would seem to be ill-founded. If one can no more escape from the political can one stop breathing, then Schmitt’s whole enterprise would seem to amount to little more than an exercise in truism. Here we arrive at a potentially decisive theological motivation behind Schmitt’s call for the renewal of the political and for the necessity of affirming the friend-enemy distinction. Such a call of duty, which finds its addressee among the ranks of politicians, political philosophers and theologians alike, can scarcely amount to anything other than a way to affirm the formula, following Hobbes, that “Jesus is the Christ”. As it turns out, engaging in political theology is one of the means by which a political philosopher continually affirms their Christianity, in part by acknowledging and affirming the infinite distance that separates earthly peace from the peace that reigns in the heavenly kingdom. Does Schmitt, then, seek to preserve at all costs the trace of God’s punishment upon the human race that is enmity? Not quite. Heinrich Meier, for instance, suggests that Leo Strauss’ critique compelled Schmitt to revise his earlier preoccupation with affirming enmity at whatever cost. Schmitt then comes to recognize that enmity must be affirmed not in itself but for the sake of that to which enmity points towards--God or the promise of eternal quietude, lest one lapses back into agonism. This promise revealed to the human race in the event of the Incarnation; the irruption of the absolute in the autistic immanence of reason that at the same time robs the latter order of its self-sufficiency. But this is in effect to reduce the whole content of Christian theology to a mere anthropological thesis; man is by nature dangerous, or evil. In this case, the “theology” motivating Schmitt’s project of political-theology would simply collapse into an austere “anthropological confession of faith”.
February 25, 2017
A both credible and incredible in equal parts. Some of the readings of the dialogue between Strauss and Schmitt are quite reasonable. But Meier engages in a lot of speculation and seems to ignore a whole section of Schmitt's legalistic approach.
March 10, 2024
When your favourite TV characters meet in one book.... And with Derrida as the mystery guest??? Honestly 10/10
The development of the dialogical polis shoes in actu the philosophical activity and the evolution that dialogue crates
The development of the dialogical polis shoes in actu the philosophical activity and the evolution that dialogue crates
to-keep-reference
October 18, 2016La considración más extensa de las concepciones de Schmitt que conozcamos está contenida en Carlo Galli, Genealogía della política: C. Schmitt e la crisi del pensiero político moderno (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1996). Esta crítica al concepto de Schmitt de la “autonomía de la política” debe extenderse a las diversas posiciones que en alguna manera derivan de su pensamiento. En dos extremos opuestos podemos citar a Leo Strauss, quien intentó apropiarse del concepto de Schmitt bajo su propia concepción liberal del derecho natural, y a Mario Tronti, quien creyó encontrar en la autonomía de la política un terreno capaz de apoyar un compromiso con las fuerzas políticas liberales en un período en el cual los partidos comunistas del Oeste europeo se hallaban en una profunda crisis. Sobre la interpretación que Strauss hace del texto de Schmitt y sus ambiguas relaciones, ver Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue, trad. J. Harvey Lomas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
Imperio Pág.231
Imperio Pág.231
October 17, 2021
This book is an essential read of political philosophy to understanding Carl Schmitt`s influence on thinkers such as Strauss.
November 2, 2025
Schmitt... that jurist? nazi? antipode of Hobbes? NO! Meier(through Strauss) peels back all the layers and shows Schmitt in full light!
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews