Joseph Cropsey's Straussian Attack on Adam Smith

Joseph Cropsey was introduced to Leo Strauss by Harry Jaffa when Strauss was teaching at the New School for Social Research in New York, before Strauss went to the University of Chicago in 1949.  Although Cropsey was convinced by Strauss to turn his mind to political philosophy, Cropsey's training was in economics at Columbia University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1952.  His dissertation was on Adam Smith, which allowed him to think about how Smith might be fitted into the Straussian view of the history of political philosophy.  That dissertation was published as a book--Polity and Economy: An Interpretation of the Principles of Adam Smith--in 1957.  Cropsey then became a faculty member in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago in 1958, and from that point, he became Strauss's closest associate.

Cropsey became the primary Straussian interpreter of Smith.  In 1963, he was the co-editor with Strauss of History of Political Philosophy, for which Cropsey wrote the chapter on Smith.  In 1976, he wrote another paper on Smith for the bicentennial of the publication of The Wealth of Nations.  In 2001, a revised version of Polity and Economy was published by St. Augustine's Press (South Bend, Indiana), which reprinted the original book and added the two later papers as two new chapters.

As a graduate student studying with Cropsey in the 1970s, I wondered about his interpretation of Smith.  But it is only in recent years, that I have begun to understand Cropsey's handling of Smith and how it fits into the Straussian story of the "crisis of liberalism."  I have become increasingly skeptical about the Straussian denigration of classical liberalism; and as I compare what Cropsey says about Smith with my own reading of Smith, I find Smithian liberalism far more defensible than Cropsey and the Straussians are willing to admit.  A big part of my thinking is that I have come to see an intellectual tradition of biological naturalism in moral and political philosophy that links Aristotle, Smith, and Darwin in a way that is ignored by the Straussians.

The revised version of Polity and Economy falls into two parts that contradict one another.  In the first part--the original book of 1957 and the book chapter of 1963--Cropsey presents an Aristotelian attack on Smith for proposing commerce as a poor substitute for virtue and excellence.  In the second part--the paper composed in 1976--Cropsey presents a Kantian attack on Smith for failing to see the incoherence of "natural liberty" and the need for a Kantian realm of freedom that transcends the realm of nature.  I will take up each of these two parts and indicate the dubious character of the reasoning in each.


THE ARISTOTELIAN ATTACK ON SMITH'S COMMERCIAL SOCIETY

Early in The Wealth of Nations, Smith identifies his position as a defense of a "commercial society."

"When the division of labour has been once thoroughly established, it is but a very small part of a man's wants which the produce of his own labour can supply.  He supplies the far greater part of them by exchanging that surplus part of the produce of his own labour, which is over and above his own consumption, for such parts of the produce of other men's labour as he has occasion for.  Every man thus lives by exchanging, or becomes in some measure a merchant, and the society itself grows to be what is properly a commercial society" (37).

Cropsey identifies this "commercial society" as the system of "liberal commerce" or "liberal capitalism," and he identifies the primary alternative as the system of "authoritative virtue" (PE, xi).  According to Cropsey, the system of liberal commerce is Hobbesian in being based on the desire for self-preservation as the defining feature of human nature in contrast to the Aristotelian principle that human beings are by nature political animals.  For Aristotle, the end of political life is to promote moral and intellectual virtue; but for Smith, commerce takes the place of virtue. 

In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith explicitly rejects Hobbes's teaching (315-18); and he affirms that he agrees with Aristotle's moral philosophy in the Nicomachean Ethics (269-73).  Remarkably, Cropsey is completely silent about this in his book.  Presumably, Cropsey must have thought that Smith was mistaken about this, but Cropsey never explains this.  Later in his book, Cropsey does contradict his claim about Smith as a Hobbesian by acknowledging that Smith actually departed from the Hobbesian reduction of human nature to self-preservation and affirmed the natural sociality of human beings (PE, 124, 128, 147).

Cropsey says that dying for noble causes shows that human desires go beyond self-preservation.  "If the end were living well or nobly, nothing would be easier to imagine than a conflict between the requirements of preservation and the requirements of man's end.  The death in battle of every courageous soldier, and the self-sacrifice of all those who have died for high causes, testify to this fact of human life" (PE, 116).  Oddly, Cropsey is silent about the fact that Smith says the same thing--that heroism in war shows how a sense of duty and honor overcomes the desire for self-preservation (TMS, 116, 138-39, 191-92).

If Cropsey is right that Smith's "liberal commerce" rejects "authoritative virtue," then we must wonder, what exactly is meant by "authoritative virtue"?  Cropsey says that "Smith rejects fear of the prince as the principle of virtuous society," because this threatens liberty, security, and justice (PE 42).  "Before Smith's epoch," Cropsey explains, "it was a settled principle of political life and philosophy that fear of the prince and fear of power invisible were alike indispensable to common life" (PE, 100).  Cropsey's only evidence for this "settled principle" is a quotation from Tudor statesman Sir William Paget: "Society is a realm doth consist and is maintained by means of religion and law, and these two or one wanting, farewell all just society, government, justice."  Smith's rejection of this "settled principle" was his "rejection of the virtuous society" and his affirmation of commerce as a substitute for virtue (PE, 110). 

Is it true that Aristotle believed that "fear of the prince and fear of power invisible" were the only way to make virtue authoritative?  It is true that at the end of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle suggests that for many people swayed by irrational passions, the coercive force of law might be the only way to habituate them to virtue.  But he also indicates that except for Sparta, almost no other political community has paid attention to the instilling of virtue through legal coercion, and consequently most moral education is left up to parents in shaping the character of their children and to the unwritten customs of a community (1179b20-1180b10).

In Books 8 and 9 of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle provides a comprehensive account of the social and political formation of the virtues through "friendship" (philia), which for Aristotle is a general term for all kinds of social bonding in which human beings show some care for one another.  Aristotle's "friendship" coincides with what Hume and Smith called "sympathy"--any kind of "fellow feeling" among human beings.  Darwin adopted this idea of and made "sympathy" one of the fundamental themes in his evolutionary account of moral and political order.  More recently, biologists and psychologists have used the word "empathy" in a way that largely corresponds to what Hume, Smith, and Darwin would call "sympathy," or what Aristotle would call "friendship."  All agree with Aristotle that the various forms of friendly feeling or social bonding that unite human beings as individuals, as fellow citizens, and as members of the same species are originally rooted in the natural affection of parental care for offspring (NE, 1155a1-33, 1159a27-37, 1160b23-62a29).  "In the household, are first found the origins and springs of friendship, of polity, and of justice" (Eudemian Ethics, 1242b1-2).

Smith's commercial liberalism coincides most closely with Aristotle's teaching about friendship and philosophy in Books 8 and 9 of the Nicomachean Ethics, which is one section of Aristotle's writing that shows his propensity to liberalism, while also showing many references to his biology.  The liberal character of Aristotle's social anthropology here becomes clear as soon as one notices how Aristotle presents social order as arising spontaneously in the natural and voluntary associations of society (see, for example, 1159b25-1160a30).

Smith follows in this tradition of Aristotelian liberalism by arguing for a biological emergence of social order from the natural instincts of human beings as social animals (TMS, 28, 77-78, 86-87, 142, 219-34; Lectures on Jurisprudence, 141-43, 163-67).  While legal coercion is required to enforce the negative rights of justice to be free from unfair injury, the other moral duties are enforced through social praise and blame and the spontaneous order of civil society (TMS, 85-86; LJ, 7-9).

Smith also follows Aristotle in looking to the friendship of philosophers as the peak of human happiness that embraces all of the moral and intellectual virtues.  The life of a Platonic or Aristotelian philosopher "necessarily supposes the utmost perfection of all the intellectual and of all the moral virtues" (TMS, 216).  The friendship of such philosophers is the highest form of friendship that is possible only among men of the highest virtue (TMS, 224-25).  Remarkably, Cropsey does not see how this contradicts his claim that The Theory of Moral Sentiments "contains literally nothing on the subject of intellectual virtue" (PE, 50).  Similarly, Cropsey says nothing about how Smith in The Wealth of Nations stresses the importance of philosophy as produced by the division of labor in the most civilized societies, in which one sees "philosophers or men of speculation, whose trade it is, not to do any thing, but to observe every thing" (WN, 21).  Cropsey ignores Smith's argument that the contemplative life of the philosophic few flourishes only in civilized, commercial societies (WN, 782-84).

The Theory of Moral Sentiments is full of observations about friendship (see, for example, 16-17, 22-23, 32-33, 38-43, 120-25, 129, 150, 174, 219-26, 256, 328).  Surprisingly, Cropsey is completely silent about this.  His only reference to friendship in his book is his identification of Hume as Smith's "senior friend and compatriot" (PE, 120).  And yet Cropsey says nothing about the prominence that Smith gave to his friendship with Hume, particularly in his famous letter to William Strahan describing the magnanimity and cheerfulness of Hume in facing his own death while conversing with his friends.  In this published letter, Smith dramatically imitated the last sentence of Plato's Phaedo by declaring that Hume had approached "as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit" (Correspondence, 221).  Thus, Smith showed how the opulence and liberty of a commercial society would provide philosophers like Hume and himself with the intellectual commerce, the individual liberty, and the leisured independence necessary for living a philosophic life with their friends.  Cropsey ignores all of this because it contradicts his argument that there is no place for the intellectual virtues of philosophy in Smith's commercial society.

The intellectual friendship of Smith and Hume arose in a dense social network of friends who met regularly in social clubs in Edinburgh and Glasgow.  Smith was a leading member of the Philosophical Society and the Select Society of Edinburgh that meet weekly for discussions of ideas in philosophy, science, and the other liberal arts.  Smith was also an active member of the Political Economy Club of Glasgow and the Oyster Club of Edinburgh.  These clubs brought together university teachers, clergymen, lawyers, judges, and merchants.  These same people came together for public lecture series.  Smith gained his first public notoriety from his long series of public lectures on rhetoric and jurisprudence from 1748 to 1751 that he delivered in Edinburgh at the invitation of Henry Home, Lord Kames, a prominent judge who was influential in shaping the intellectual life of Edinburgh.  This intellectual commerce in Scotland was also manifested in the publication of journals like the Edinburgh Review (1755-56) and many books.  Because of this intellectual activity, Edinburgh became known as the "Athens of the North."  Cropsey says nothing about this.

Notably, while Peter Minowitz, in his book Profits, Priests, and Princes: Adam Smith's Emancipation of Economics from Politics and Religion (Stanford University Press, 1993), generally agrees with Cropsey's Straussian interpretation of Smith, Minowitz has a section of his book on "The Contemplative Ideal" in Smith's writing, where he suggests a criticism of Cropsey for ignoring how Smith conveys "ancient notions of the exclusivity or superiority of philosophy" (83-86).

According to Cropsey, Smith's commercial society denies the importance not only of intellectual virtue but also moral virtue.  Cropsey does recognize that Smith relies on social approbation and disapprobation to enforce moral norms.  Moreover, in small communities, such as religious groups, "the citizens' conduct is regulated by their constant mutual surveillance" (PE, 95).  But, apparently, Cropsey believes that this cannot enforce "authoritative virtue," which depends upon the coercive force of law working through "the fear of the prince and fear of power invisible."

Here we see the fundamental issue in the debate over commercial liberalism.  A commercial liberal like Smith separates the coercive force of government as directed to securing liberty from the natural and voluntary associations of society as directed to securing virtue.  But for Cropsey, virtue can only be secured through the coercive force of a Spartan government.

In his original book on Smith, Cropsey argued that Smith's commercial society was designed to secure freedom but not virtue.  In his book chapter of 1963, however, Cropsey changed his mind and argued that Smith wanted to secure both freedom and virtue:

"When it is borne in mind that Smith's teaching aims at the articulation of morality and preservation, and that the practical fruits of his doctrine are intended to be gathered by emancipating men, under mild government, to seek their happiness freely according to their individual desires, the accomplishment as a whole demands great respect.  The reconciliation of the private good and the common good by the medium not of coercion but of freedom, on a basis of moral duty, had perhaps never been seen before" (PE, 129).

Apparently, however, Cropsey thinks this liberal combination of freedom and virtue is impossible.  He also thinks it is incoherent in its assumption that freedom within nature is possible, which is his Kantian criticism of Smith.


THE KANTIAN ATTACK ON SMITH'S NATURAL LIBERTY

 In his Wealth of Nations, Smith identifies his position as "the system of natural liberty" (687).  In 1976, Cropsey lectured on "The Invisible Hand: Moral and Political Considerations," which became the last chapter of his revised book on Smith.  Here he criticized Smith for failing to recognize Immanuel Kant's insight that "natural liberty" is an incoherent idea, because nature and freedom are contradictory, and therefore freedom of the will must belong to a realm of freedom that transcends the realm of nature.  Smith does not see this because he assumes, along with Hume, that moral freedom is part of human nature, and that human nature is part of nature as a whole.  Consequently, for Smith and Hume, the science of moral and political philosophy is a natural science.  According to Cropsey, this is wrong, because it fails to recognize Kant's point that for freedom of the will to be possible, it must be "outside the causal chain of natural necessity" (PE, 155).  The moral freedom of human beings must be "outside nature" (PE, 156).

If our moral choices are expressions of our natural desires, then those choices are not truly free choices because they are determined by our desires.  To be free, our moral reason must be able to grasp moral truth as a cosmic truth about the universe that does not depend on our natural human desires.

By embracing this Kantian dualistic metaphysics of morals, Cropsey moves from Aristotle to Kant.  For Aristotle, "thought by itself moves nothing."  Deliberate choice (proairesis) must combine reason and desire: it is either rational desire or desiring reason (NE, 1139a35-39b7).  Children and other animals are capable of voluntary action.  But only mature human adults have the cognitive capacity for deliberate choice.  For Aristotle, being morally responsible is not being free of one's natural desires.  Rather, to be responsible, one must organize and manage one's desires through habituation and reflection to conform to some conception of a whole life well lived.  To do this, one must act deliberately in the present in the light of one's past experiences and future expectations.  One must do this to attain happiness, which is the ultimate end of all human action.  If "free will" means acting as an uncaused cause, acting outside the natural order of the world, then Aristotle has no conception of "free will" as understood by Kant.  In all of this, Aristotle would agree with Hume, Smith, and Darwin (see my Darwinian Natural Right, 69-87).

There are lots of problems with Kant's metaphysical morality.  One of them is that he identifies nature in a reductionistic way as mere mechanism, as what Cropsey calls "the motion of lifeless matter according to mere laws of physics" (PE, 165).  If this is nature, then there surely cannot be any freedom within nature.  But if nature includes the emergent evolution of life with higher levels of organization that cannot be fully reduced to the laws of physics, then living nature can show the freedom of animal voluntary movement and of human deliberate choice (as indicated in Aristotle's The Movement of Animals).

That Smith does not understand the "nature" in "natural liberty" as a deterministic mechanism of absolute necessity should be clear from the fact that he believes that "natural liberty" has been generally violated by the policies of Europe.  In some cases, the "natural order of things" has been "entirely inverted."  Even Smith himself recommends certain governmental regulations of banking, although this would be a "manifest violation of natural liberty" (WN, 116, 157, 324, 376-80, 530).  If "natural liberty" can be violated by human institutions, then human nature cannot be understood as a deterministic mechanism governed by the laws of physics.  Smith admits that far from being a necessity of nature, his "system of natural liberty" is actually utopian, because it contradicts the natural selfishness of merchants and manufacturers who use their power to promote policies that restrict competition (WN, 157-58, 266-67, 471, 584, 647-48).

Another problem is that Kant's metaphysical dualism is implausible.  To most of us, the idea of a realm of noumenal freedom transcending the realm of phenomenal nature is hard to believe as anything other than an imaginary creation.  Even Cropsey suggests this: "Superfluously to raise the question of man's bondage to nature has effects that go beyond the theoretical.  It either prepares the way for despair: there is no escape from the absolutely comprehensive and equally tyrannical grip of the natural All; or it compels men to find, which probably means invent, an enclave inside or a platform outside nature in the form of a state of the consciousness or the will, by which in spirit man will elevate himself to freedom in a sense most elusive" (PE, 165-66).  So is the Kantian realm of freedom an invention?  Earlier in his book, Cropsey claims that "Smith understood science to be human invention, as distinct from discovery," and Cropsey sees this as a good ground for criticizing Smith (PE, 51).

Perhaps because of this thought that Kantian dualistic metaphysics is a mere invention of Kant's imagination, Cropsey later, in the 1980s, turned away from Kant to Heidegger.  This Heideggerian turn is evident in his Heideggerian interpretation of Plato in his book Plato's World.  Embracing Heidegger's idea that the being of human being understood as Dasein is defined as "care" (Sorge), Cropsey read Plato as teaching that human beings care about their existence within an uncaring world of nature and without any divinity to care for them.

This Heideggerian turn in Cropsey's thought shows a problem in the Straussian story of political philosophy.  On the one hand, Strauss and the Straussians have generally argued that the ancient conception of natural right is based on a cosmic teleology of nature that is denied by modern liberalism.  On the other hand, they have also intimated--as their secret teaching?--that the ancient political philosophers did not really believe in a cosmic teleology as anything other than a noble lie.

Although Smith sometimes invokes a cosmic teleology guided by the "Author of Nature," there are lots of reasons to believe that this is a rhetorical gesture to escape the charge of infidelity, and that his moral and political philosophy is grounded in an immanent teleology of human nature rather than a cosmic teleology of Divine design.

Many of my points here have been elaborated in other posts here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

The "Romantic Freedom" of Philosophers in Adam Smith's Commerical Society: Against Cropsey's Straussian Reading of Smith

At the Adam Smith conference in Bogota, one of the most interesting papers was by Yiftah Elazar and Michelle Schwarze--"Liberty Lost: Adam Smith on Romantic Freedom."  They note that Smith identifies "opulence and freedom" as "the two greatest blessings men can possess" (LJ, 185).  But then they observe that having both at the same time is often hard: in particular, Smith suggests that what they call "romantic freedom"--freedom from restless pursuit, or being "free from labour, and from care, and from all the turbulent passions which attend them, or being free from "toil and anxiety" (TMS, 32, 51, 183)--is hard for individuals to achieve in a modern affluent commercial society, where everyone seems so restless in their striving to satisfy their avaricious and ambitious desires for "bettering their condition," that they give up  all leisure, all ease, and all careless security in their lives, which Smith recognized as a "loss of liberty" (TMS, 51).  Here, Smith seems to accept Rousseau's criticism of the commercial society as depriving human beings of the freedom from restless pursuit that was enjoyed by the savage in the pure state of nature, which anticipates Marx's claim, in his comments on Smith's Wealth of Nations, that greed in capitalist societies drives people to a restless laboring in which they end up "completely losing all their freedom."

Elazar and Schwarze do suggest, however, that Smith points to one way to regain romantic freedom within commercial societies:  the "prudent man" can resolve to "never come within the circle of ambition," so that he can "live free, fearless, and independent" (TMS, 57), because he "would prefer the undisturbed enjoyment of secure tranquility, not only to all the vain splendour of successful ambition, but to the real and solid glory of performing the greatest and most magnanimous actions" (215-216).  Nevertheless, Elazar and Schwarze admit that "the prudent man's idealized approach to labor" is probably impossible for most common laboring people.

As I read their paper and listened to their presentation in Bogota, I wondered how they would respond to my thought that Smith suggests that romantic freedom from restless pursuit is best found in the philosophic life of people like Smith and Hume.  In quoting from the passages on the "prudent man," they don't quote Smith's identification of the "superior prudence" of the Platonic or Aristotelian philosophers (TMS, 216).  Nor do they quote Smith's explanation that in the restless pursuits of ambition and avarice there are three levels of human beings.  By the "ordinary standard of human nature," most human beings are restless and anxious in their pursuit of distinction.  Those few people who are free from this are either above this level of human nature or below it.  Those below it show a "slothful and sottish indifference to superiority."  Those above it are those "confirmed in wisdom and real philosophy" (57).  The friendships of virtue among philosophers like Smith and Hume show highest perfection of "the wise and virtuous man," who is free from restless labor and striving for ambition (224-25, 247).

In the Wealth of Nations, Smith stresses the importance of philosophy as produced by the division of labor in the most commercial and civilized societies, in which one sees "philosophers or men of speculation, who trade it is, not to do anything, but to observe everything" (21, 782-84).  Because they live a contemplative or theoretical life, rather than a practical life striving for wealth and rank, philosophers enjoy romantic freedom from restless striving.

As I have indicated in some previous posts (here and here), I want to show how liberal open societies provide freedom for philosophers to live the philosophic life as a challenge to the claim of Leo Strauss and the Straussians (like Joseph Cropsey) that Smith's commercial society has no place for the philosophic life.  This Straussian account of liberal modernity fails to see how the liberal social order--such as that sketched in Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, Wealth of Nations, and Lectures on Jurisprudence--secures the conditions for all the lives of moral and intellectual excellence, including the intellectual friendships of philosophers like Smith and Hume.

Adam Smith's Aristotelian Liberalism: Philosophic Friendship in a Commercial Society

One of the most fascinating, and perplexing, features of Adam Smith's writing is that while he defends the modern commercial way of life, there is hardly any serious criticism of the commercial society that cannot be found in Smith's writing.  Even Karl Marx could quote long passages from Smith to depict the "alienation" of labor in a capitalist society.

Some scholars of political philosophy--the Straussians, for example--would explain this by saying that Smith was defending the commercial society as "low but solid."  To secure the solid benefits of a commercial way of life--liberty and opulence--he was willing to accept the low aims of modernity, even when this meant depriving most human beings of genuine happiness and genuine excellence.  And yet he could not do this without lamenting the loss of the human greatness promoted by pre-modern thought.  This is what the Straussians like to call "the problem of the bourgeois."  This is Joseph Cropsey's argument in Polity and Economy.

But this interpretation of Smith seems hardly plausible if one notices that Smith defends the "wise and virtuous man" as the standard of moral and intellectual perfection as manifested in the life of philosophic friends (TMS VI.i.14, 216; VI.ii.I.18, 224-25; VI.iii.23-25, 247-48).  He observes that the division of labor in a commercial society allows for the intellectual commerce of philosophers "whose trade it is, not to do anything, but to observe everything" (WN I.i.9, 21).  And he presents the life of David Hume as showing how a commercial society provides the conditions for the philosophic life--a life that in Hume's case approached "as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit" (Letter to Strahan, Nov. 9, 1776, CAS, 221).

This language echoes the end of Plato's Phaedo.  Describing the death of Socrates, Phaedo observes: "Such was the end of our friend, who was, as we may say, of all those of his time whom we have known, the best and wisest and most just man" (118a).  Thus, Smith is suggesting that Hume shows how a Socratic life of philosophic inquiry is possible in a modern commercial society.

Moreover, Smith saw his account of virtue as compatible with Aristotle's teaching in the Nicomachean Ethics (TMS VI.iii, 237-62; VII.ii.I.12-14, 270-72).  This has led Ryan Hanley and other Smith scholars to interpret Smith as an Aristotelian virtue ethicist (Calkins and Werhane 1998; Hanley 2009).

My explanation of this is that Smith's commercial liberalism coincides most closely with Aristotle's teaching about friendship and philosophy in Books 8 and 9 of the Nicomachean Ethics, which also happens to be one of the sections of Aristotle's moral and political writing that shows a propensity to liberalism, while also showing many references to his biology.

As I have argued in some previous posts, how one reads Aristotle's Ethics turns crucially on whether one sees the peak of his teaching in the books on friendship (books 8-9) or in the final book on philosophy as a purely contemplative life beyond the moral virtues (book 10).  Philosophy as presented in book 10 is a purely theoretical life of solitary contemplation without friendship, and it's a life striving for an abstraction of the mind from the body.  But philosophy as presented in books 8-9 is a life of philosophic conversation and thought with one's friends, which combines all the moral and intellectual virtues as perfecting the psychosomatic unity of human biological nature.  Smith's moral and political philosophy follows the approach that Aristotle took in books 8-9.

In The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics, Eric Havelock argued that in ancient Greece there was a tradition of liberal thought supporting Periclean democracy.  While most of the writing in this tradition--including Democritus, Antiphon, Protagoras, and Lycophron--survived only as fragments, Havelock thought the ideas of this liberal tradition could be found scattered in the texts of Greek tragedy and poetry as well as the texts of Plato and Aristotle.  In particular, he thought that books 8-9 of the Nicomachean Ethics incorporates ideas from the biological anthropology of the liberals--especially "friendship as a biological and social fact" that

"becomes that spontaneous feeling of sympathy or goodwill which all members of a species are supposed by definition to feel for each other, and which expresses their recognition that they have common traits.  Beginning perhaps as a herd instinct, it becomes the basis for that cooperation which creates and supports human society" (298).
 

The biological character of the anthropology in this part of the Ethics becomes evident as soon as one notices how often Aristotle here invokes the biological propensities to pleasure, sexual mating, parental care, and other social instincts (see, for example, 1153b7-1154a1, 1154b1-22, 1155a17-22, 1159a27-33, 1161b15-1162a30).  The liberal character of this anthropology becomes clear when one notices how Aristotle presents social order as arising spontaneously in the natural and voluntary associations of society (see, for example, 1159b25-1160a30).

Smith follows in this tradition of Aristotelian liberalism by arguing for a biological emergence of social order from the natural instincts of human beings as social animals (see, for example, TMS I.ii.2-3, 28; 77-78; II.ii.3-5, 86-87; III.3.13, 142; VI.ii.I-II, 219-34; LJ, 141-43, 163-67).  While legal coercion is required to enforce the negative rights of justice to be free from unfair injury, the other moral duties are enforced through social praise and blame and the spontaneous order of civil society (TMS II.ii.1-4, 85-86; LJ, 7-9).

Smith also follows Aristotle in looking to philosophical friendship as the peak of human happiness that embraces all of the moral and intellectual virtues.  The life of a Platonic or Aristotelian philosopher "necessarily supposes the utmost perfection of all the intellectual and of all the moral virtues.  It is the best head joined to the best heart.  It is the most perfect wisdom combined with the most perfect virtue" (TMS, VI.i.15, 216).  The friendship of such philosophers is the highest form of friendship that is possible only among men of the highest virtue (TMS, VI.ii.I.18, 224-25).  (Notice how Smith's reference to both the intellectual and moral virtues contradicts Cropsey's claim that TMS "contains nothing on the subject of intellectual virtue" [Polity and Economy, 50].)

Smith's clearest portrait of such philosophic friendship was in his letter to Strahan describing the magnanimity and cheerfulness of Hume in facing his own death while conversing with his friends.  As argued by Eric Schliesser, this letter, considered in the circumstances surrounding it, shows how the life of philosophy and philosophic friendship is possible in a modern commercial society. 

Both Hume and Smith defended commercial civilization as superior to savage and premodern societies, and they suggested that in a commercial society, philosophy could prosper as a professional trade in the division of labor.  The opulence and liberty of a commercial society would provide philosophers with the intellectual commerce and the leisured independence necessary for living a philosophic life with their friends. (Does this confirm the claim in Book 8 of Plato's Republic that democracy is the only regime that leaves people the freedom to live the philosophic life?) 

Smith indicates that philosophers can benefit their fellow citizens through mechanical inventions, through the propagation of general knowledge, or through promoting "general ideas concerning the great subjects of religion, morals, and government" as bearing upon human happiness (LJ, 574).  So, for example, Smith's writing on morality, economics, and politics could be seen as an exercise in philosophic beneficence.

But many of Hume's critics doubted his beneficence in his philosophic attacks on religious beliefs in miracles, providence, immortality of the soul, and the afterlife.  And while Smith often invoked conceptions of divine providence over the order of nature, many of this readers suspected that he was as much of an infidel as his friend Hume.

Smith showed his sensitivity to this public suspicion in refusing Hume's request for publishing The Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion after his death.  And yet his letter on Hume's cheerful facing of death without any belief in the afterlife provoked a public outcry against Smith.

The Dialogues provide incisive philosophical arguments against natural theology--against the idea that the order of nature manifests the intelligent design of the Creator.  The Dialogues also provide some of the clearest anticipations of Darwin's argument for the emergence of natural order through the unintended order of evolution.  So we are left wondering whether Smith agreed with Hume's proto-Darwinian thinking, or whether he thought that philosophers should show their beneficence by suppressing such teaching.

REFERENCES
Calkins, Martin J., and Patricia H. Werhane, "Adam Smith, Aristotle, and the Virtues of Commerce," The Journal of Value Inquiry, 32 (1998): 43-60.

Den Uyl, Douglas, and Charles Griswold, "Adam Smith on Friendship and Love," Review of Metaphysics, 49 (March 1996): 609-37.

Hanley, Ryan Patrick, Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

Havelock, Eric A., The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1957).

Schliesser, Eric, "The Obituary of a Vain Philosopher: Adam Smith's Reflections on Hume's Life," Hume Studies, 29 (November 2003): 327-62.


Some posts on related topics can be found here, here, and here.

The Philosophic Life in Smith's Commercial Society: Strauss, Cropsey, and McCloskey

Although Joseph Cropsey and Deirdre McCloskey contradict one another in their interpretations of Adam Smith, they apparently agree that there is no place for the intellectual virtues of philosophy in Smith's commercial society.  Cropsey argues that for Smith commerce is a substitute for virtue, and in particular Smith says "literally nothing on the subject of intellectual virtue" (Polity and Economy, 50), which shows how Smith turns away from Aristotelian virtue to Hobbesian hedonism.  On the contrary, McCloskey argues that Smith rejected Hobbesian hedonism and affirmed Aristotelian virtue ethics.  And yet McCloskey is silent about whether Smith's virtues include the intellectual virtues of philosophy.

The issue here is more than just a scholarly disagreement over the interpretation of Smith.  It's the question of whether there is any place for the philosophic life in a modern commercial bourgeois society.  As a student and colleague of Leo Strauss, Cropsey embraced Strauss's claim that while the Ancients (particularly Plato and Aristotle) saw the supremacy of the philosophic life as the only naturally good life for those few human beings capable of it, the Moderns (including Smith) promote the low hedonism of a liberal society devoted to comfortable self-preservation that does not allow for the human excellence of the philosophic life.

As I have indicated in a previous post, Cropsey completely ignores Smith's argument that the contemplative life of the philosophic few flourishes only in commercial societies (see, for example, The Wealth of Nations, Liberty Fund, 782-84).  McCloskey does not include the intellectual virtues of philosophy in her list of virtues, although she does speak about the arts and sciences as belonging to the virtues of transcendence that can be expressed in a bourgeois society.  Neither Cropsey nor McCloskey give any attention to Smith's emphasis on the importance of philosophic friendship in a commercial society.

Cropsey's interpretation of Smith seems hardly plausible if one notices that Smith defends the "wise and virtuous man" as the standard of moral and intellectual perfection as manifested in the life of philosophic friends (TMS, VI.i.14, 216; VI.ii.I.18, 224-25; VI.iii.23-25, 247-48).  He observes that the division of labor in a commercial society allows for the intellectual commerce of philosophers "whose trade it is, not to do anything, but to observe everything" (WN, I.i.9, 21). Smith presents the life of David Hume as showing how a commercial society provides the conditions for the philosophic life--a life that in Hume's case approached "as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit" (Letter to Strahan, Nov. 9, 1776, CAS, 221).

This language echoes the end of Plato's Phaedo. Describing the death of Socrates, Phaedo observes: "Such was the end of our friend, who was, as we may say, of all those of his time whome we have known, the best and wisest and most just man" (118a).  Thus, Smith is suggesting that Hume showed how a Socratic life of philosophic inquiry is possible in a modern commercial society, just as Socrates lived his philosophic life in the commercial society of Athens.  (I have elaborated these points in a previous post.)

Smith follows Aristotle in looking to philosophical friendship as the peak of human happiness that embraces all of the moral and intellectual virtues.  The life of a Platonic or Aristotelian philosopher "necessarily supposes the utmost perfection of all the intellectual and of all the moral virtues.  It is the best head joined to the best heart. It is the most perfect wisdom combined with the most perfect virtue" (TMS, VI.i.15, 216).  The friendship of such philosophers is the highest form of friendship that is possible only among people of the highest virtue (TMS, VI.ii.I.18, 224-25).

McCloskey's account of Smith's virtue ethics is silent, however, about philosophic virtue.  Although she puts Smith in the tradition of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, she says nothing about the Aristotelian and Thomistic argument that the contemplative life of intellectual virtue is higher than the practical life of moral virtue.  As far as I have noticed, McCloskey mentions the intellectual virtues only once in her trilogy of books on the Bourgeois Era, and this comes only through her quoting from Thomas Aquinas: "The intellectual and moral virtues perfect the human intellect and appetite in proportion to human nature, but the theological virtues do so supernaturally" (quoted at The Bourgeois Virtues, 151).  She does not refer to Aquinas's argument in agreement with Aristotle that the intellectual virtues of the contemplative life are more excellent than the moral virtues of the active life (see Summa Theologica, II-II, q. 182. a. 1).

McCloskey does seem to suggest an opening for the philosophic life in a commercial society insofar as a liberal bourgeois regime allows a free marketplace of ideas as part of the "open society" (BE, 562-63).  Strauss and the Straussians would seem to say that this is impossible, because any stable society must be a "closed society" based on common opinions that are protected from philosophic questioning.  That's why philosophers must write esoterically to protect society from philosophy and to protect philosophers from social attack. 

And yet, as I have indicated in earlier posts here, here, here, here, and here, Straussians like Arthur Melzer suggest that since 1800 esoteric writing has been rendered largely unnecessary in modern liberal societies, where pluralist toleration allows for a freedom of discussion.  If so, then it would seem that the Straussians have to agree with McCloskey that the Bourgeois Era has successfully brought an open society in which the intellectual virtues of the philosophic life can flourish without persecution, which vindicates the truth of modern liberal enlightenment.

Joseph Cropsey, 1920-2012

Joseph Cropsey died on July 1 at the age of 92 in Rockville, Maryland.

He was my major professor and the supervisor of my dissertation when I was a graduate student in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago, 1971-1978.

Through his childhood friend, Harry Jaffa, he learned about Leo Strauss when Strauss was teaching at the New School for Social Research in New York City.  Cropsey was a Ph.D. student in economics at Columbia University, writing a dissertation on Adam Smith.  Eventually, he jointed Strauss at the University of Chicago.

His classes in the history of political philosophy were always full, with as many as 60-70 students in each class.  Part of the attraction of his classes was his elegant style of lecturing.  I have never heard anyone who could lecture as he did without notes for one and a half hours, speaking in complete sentences and paragraphs.  A typescript of a lecture could be a well-written essay.

My preference was for a more engaged, discussion-style class.  I would often try to ask questions to initiate an interchange, and it was made clear that this was not what he wanted.  Eventually, I learned to enjoy what I could from his lecturing.

We often disagreed.  In fact, he fundamentally disagreed with the argument of my dissertation on Aristotle's Rhetoric, because like many Straussians, he had no interest in the possibility that rhetoric could be a form of genuine reasoning, which was my argument.  Nevertheless, he allowed me to develop my reasoning, and approved my dissertation despite my disagreement with him.  I respected this, and it has been the model for me in supervising dissertations.

He was a remarkable thinker.  I have written a blog post on his book Plato's World and another post on his reading of Adam Smith.

He will be missed.

William Kristol has written an obituary in The Weekly Standard for Cropsey, Anna Schwartz, and Yitzhak Shamir, who all died in the last two weeks.

Michael Millerman's Mistaken Promotion of Right-Wing Anti-Liberalism: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Strauss, Dugin, and Putin

                                                                       Michael Millerman

The latest issue (February 2023) of First Things has an article by Michael Millerman--"Alexander Dugin Explained."  I have written previously about Dugin as the right-wing anti-liberal who has been called "Putin's philosopher," because Dugin has developed the philosophic defense of Putin's anti-liberal Eurasian imperialism.  As the English translator of Dugin who has also written two books on Dugin and Dugin's Heideggerian philosophic tradition, Millerman has established himself as Dugin's primary interpreter for the English-speaking world, and thus as the leading conduit for passing Dugin's ideas to far-right neo-fascist thinkers in Western Europe and North America.  The publication of Millerman's article in First Things is significant because First Things is the leading journal of political theology for right-wing illiberal Christians and Jews, which now includes illiberal Russian Orthodox believers like Dugin and Putin.

As you can see if you go to Millerman's website, he presents himself as a passionate philosophic thinker with a fundamental intellectual commitment to the thought of Leo Strauss and Martin Heidegger understood as part of a Counter-Enlightenment tradition of right-wing illiberalism going back to Friedrich Nietzsche.  Millerman wrote about this in his doctoral thesis for his Ph.D. in political science at the University of Toronto.  This got him into trouble.  As noted in an article in Canada's National Post, two of his doctoral advisers (Clifford Orwin and Ronald Beiner) resigned from his dissertation committee because they didn't want to be associated with someone who apparently embraced right-wing extremist ideas.  Since then, he has failed to find an academic teaching position.  Now, he makes his living by selling his online courses on philosophy, which he advertises as "Premium Political Philosophy"!  A revised version of his doctoral thesis has been published as a book--Beginning with Heidegger: Strauss, Rorty, Derrida, Dugin and the Philosophical Constitution of the Political (London: Arktos, 2020).

To illustrate what people find troublesome about Millerman's writing, consider the last paragraph of his First Things article:

"Dugin has said of Putin, 'I believe both he and I are reading the same writings, written in golden letters on the skies of Russian history.'  Words such as these remind us of other philosophers who wedded themselves to tyrants.  Heidegger's support for Hitler offers an unsettling example.  As was the case with Heidegger, Dugin's ill-starred political alliance causes many to dismiss him, writing him off as the source of intellectual legitimation for a fascist, keptocratic thug who wishes to recreate the Russian empire.  Duginism is indeed compatible with Putinism, but we need to see that it is not reducible to it.  It is more accurate to say that Dugin is the chief philosophical mastermind of an ideologically coherent alternative to Western political modernity.  And like it or not, that is a remarkable accomplishment, from which even those who wish to defend political modernity in the West can learn a great deal."

The problem here is that any philosophical position that is "compatible" with evil must be morally and intellectually mistaken.  As I have said in some previous posts, the Nietzschean and Straussian philosophizing in favor of right-wing illiberalism suffers from at least three mistakes in the reading of some political philosophers:  a mistaken reading of John Locke, a mistaken reading of Adam Smith, and a mistaken reading of Friedrich Nietzsche.  I have also written about this in my chapters on Locke, Smith, Nietzsche, and Strauss in Political Questions: Political Philosophy from Plato to Pinker (4th edition, 2016).

It is a mistake to assume (as many Straussians have) that Locke promotes a hedonistic relativism that denies the moral and intellectual virtues.  In fact, Locke's liberalism secures the conditions for social virtue and the intellectual excellence of the philosophic life.

It is also a mistake to assume (as Joseph Cropsey and other Straussians have) that in Smith's commercial society, commerce takes the place of virtue.  In fact, Smith's commercial society promotes both the bourgeois virtues and the intellectual virtues of the philosophic life.

And, finally, it is also a mistake to assume (as most Straussians do) that Nietzsche's best philosophic work is in his early and late writings.  In fact, Nietzsche's Darwinian aristocratic liberalism in his middle writings (particularly, Human, All Too Human) is superior to his Dionysian aristocratic radicalism in his early and late writings.

Millerman has written: "we have to face the abyss Strauss warned us about:  there just is no sure philosophical foundation for liberal-democracy these days."  

Notice that Millerman simply assumes that Strauss and the Straussians must be right about this.  As far as I can see, Millerman never proves that this is true.  He never considers the possibility that a secure philosophical foundation for liberal democracy can be found in the texts of Locke, Smith, and Nietzsche.

Moreover, like other recent advocates of right-wing anti-liberalism (like Patrick Deneen), Millerman does not consider the empirical evidence that modern liberalism really does promote human flourishing.  Nor does Millerman present any empirical evidence that people who live under illiberal tyrants like Putin live lives with more liberty and virtue than those who live in liberal regimes.

By refusing to examine and assess the theoretical reasoning and empirical evidence supporting liberalism, Millerman shows that he is not an inquisitive philosopher but a committed ideologist of illiberalism. 

If I am wrong about this, Millerman can correct me.

By the way, if I had been a professor at Toronto while Millerman was writing his dissertation, I would have happily served on his committee (unlike Orwin and Beiner).  But I would have insisted that he answer my criticisms with some rigorous arguments showing how there can be no theoretical or empirical defense of liberalism, and showing how right-wing illiberalism is clearly superior theoretically and empirically.

A Thousand Posts (6)

2014
As has often been the case, some of my writing in 2014 reflected the courses I was teaching--in the spring, a course on "Hobbes, Kant, and Pinker: War, Peace, and Declining Violence," and in the fall, a course on Adam Smith.  Although I retired from NIU in 2012, I continued to teach one course a semester, until my last course in the spring of 2016.

As I reached the end of my teaching career, I thought about the wide diversity of topics that I had been able to teach.  I was grateful to the Department of Political Science at Northern Illinois University for the freedom I had there to teach almost anything I wanted to teach.  I began to wonder whether there was any topic that I wished I had taught but did not. 

I thought about two topics--intelligence and race.  I had thought often about teaching a course on the scientific study of intelligence, IQ, and race, including the moral and political implications of such research.  I must have begun thinking about this in 1994 when I read Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve and saw the intense academic and public controversy this provoked.  I thought about having a set of readings that would represent all sides of the debate.  But then I could never imagine how I could teach such a course without creating an emotional explosion in the classroom that would be too disruptive to manage.  This explains why few universities even have courses on the scientific study of intelligence:  professors are afraid to teach such courses for fear that they will be branded as racists.

I was able, however, to introduce these topics into some political philosophy courses.  In a class on John Rawls' Theory of Justice, for example, we read some articles on IQ testing and on the argument of Herrnstein and Murray that a society with equality of opportunity might produce a cognitive meritocracy with a class structure based on IQ.  We could then ask: Should we seek equality of opportunity but not equality of result, even when that allows a cognitive elite to become the ruling class?  I introduce this question in my chapter on Rawls in the 4th edition of Political Questions, which allows for a discussion in the book of the debate over Murray's claim that gaps in average IQ contribute to the separation between upper classes and lower classes, and that this is not just a racial problem, but also a problem in white America, because a large portion of the American white population with below average IQ has become a disadvantaged underclass.

This debate came up in some of my posts in 2014 on IQ, race, and human biodiversity (May, June, July, and September).  Many of these posts on the biodiversity of races were connected with Nicholas Wade's book--A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History--which provoked a fierce controversy when it was published in 2014.  One of the critical reviewers of Wade's book concluded:   "So: race is real, and race is genetic, but that does not mean that race is 'really' genetic."  If that's as confusing to you as it was to me, look at my post on this in September.

There were also posts on the Flynn effect--James Flynn's observation that average IQ scores have been rising over the past century--and on Steven Pinker's argument that there might be a moral Flynn effect: increasing intelligence from a culture of scientific Enlightenment might lead to moral progress (such as declining violence) from better moral reasoning.  Pinker has even suggested that the more intelligent people might be more inclined to classical liberalism or libertarianism (May and June).

Charles Murray was one of the speakers at the Mont Pelerin Society meeting in the Galapagos in 2013, and my post on his lecture on human nature and human biodiversity (July 2013) was one of my first posts on this issue.  While Murray rejected the idea of equality understood as the sameness of all individuals or as requiring equality of outcomes in life, he affirmed equality of opportunity--that all individuals should have an equal opportunity to pursue their happiness, with the expectation that such free and equal pursuit of happiness will produce different outcomes for different individuals that will manifest their natural human diversity.

Murray's lecture reminded me of the last chapter of The Bell Curve, which is entitled "A Place for Everyone."  He opens the chapter with a question: "How should policy deal with the twin realities that people differ in intelligence for reasons that are not their fault, and that intelligence has a powerful bearing on how well people do in life?"  He answers this with a classical liberal argument for equal liberty.  He rejects the answer that government should create the equality of condition, because this would require an egalitarian tyranny contrary to human nature.  "People who are free to behave differently from one another in the important affairs of daily life inevitably generate the social and economic inequalities that egalitarianism seeks to suppress."  But a free people are equal in their equal rights for pursuing happiness in ways that do not coercively interfere with the rights of others pursuing their happiness.  In a society of equal liberty, those individuals who are naturally more intelligent or talented than others will reap the benefits of those superior traits, but those superior individuals will have no right to exploit those of lesser abilities.  In such a society, equal liberty provides the conditions for everyone to find valued places for themselves.

This debate over whether liberal democratic societies that affirm equality of rights can tolerate social and economic inequality was intensified in 2014 by the publication of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which argues that rising inequality in Western Europe and North America has become so stark that by the middle of the 21st century, the top 1% will own over 90% of the wealth.  To avoid this, we need to expand governmental welfare systems and increase tax rates on the rich to redistribute the wealth, so as to at least moderate the level of inequality.  I wrote a series of posts responding to Piketty's argument in July.

In the evolution of inequality, I see five stages: simple foraging societies, complex foraging societies, agrarian states, capitalist liberal states, and capitalist welfare states.  In none of these social orders, does one see absolute equality.  Even in the most egalitarian foraging societies, there is inequality, in that some people have a little more status, power, or wealth than others.  If one were serious about achieving something close to equality of condition, one would have to embrace Marxist proposals for abolishing private property, abolishing free markets, abolishing the family, and putting all of economic life under governmental central planning.  Piketty is quite clear in rejecting this as unworkable.

Moreover, Piketty passes over very quickly the possibility of "good inequality"--where there is a lot of mobility into and out of the top ranks of wealth and status, where those in the top ranks have earned their ranking (through advanced education, assortative mating with other highly educated people, entering stable marriages, and so on), and where most of those in the bottom rank are not living in true poverty.  I wrote about this in January and September of 2016.

Piketty seems to be proposing a strong form of democratic socialism like that of the Nordic countries. But as I have indicated in a post (in June), many Marxist socialists have seen this as a betrayal of true socialism. 

The economic success of the Nordic countries has been due not just to their welfare state policies, but crucially to their economic freedom.  In the international indices of economic freedom as formulated by libertarian think tanks like the Fraser Institute and the Cato Institute, all of the Nordic countries rank high, and some rank higher than the United States.  Countries with low levels of economic freedom are not successful. We can explain this as manifesting the natural human desire for freedom as rooted in evolved human nature.

I was impressed by one piece of academic work coming out of a Nordic country in 2014. Jon Anstein Olsen successfully defended his dissertation for his Ph.D. at the University of Oslo (Norway), which is entitled Neo-Darwinian Conservatism in the United States.  This is a fascinating work, and not just because I play a prominent role in it!  It is a thoughtful history and assessment of the argument for a Darwinian conservatism as it has developed in the United States over the past 40 years. 

He identifies me first as a proponent of "neo-Darwinian conservative pessimism," in which I make a Darwinian argument for what Thomas Sowell called the "constrained vision" of social life as opposed to the "unconstrained vision."  He also identifies me as a proponent of "neo-Darwinian natural right," in which I make a Darwinian argument for what Leo Strauss called "natural right."

Olsen suggests at least eight possible criticisms of my reasoning.

1.  Straw men.  Olsen charges that in my criticisms of the Left, I loosely associate modern liberalism with socialism, communism, and utopian thinking, which is a straw-man argument, because modern liberals today are not socialists, communists, or utopians.

2.  Moral progress.  He also charges that in my conservative pessimism and in my insistence on how imperfect human nature constrains what we can do, I ignore the moral progress in history that has been brought about by the Left.

3.  The naturalistic fallacy.  Olsen says that my project is "fundamentally and essentially guilty of committing the naturalistic fallacy," in trying to infer normative values from descriptive facts.

4.  Emotivism.  He criticizes me for trying to ground all morality on mere feeling or emotion, and thus ignoring the necessity for moral reason to rule over the "vulgar passions."

5.  The interpersonal dimension.  He also criticizes me for saying nothing about the "interpersonal dimension" of human life and thus failing to see that morality is always about the interests or perspectives of more than one individual.

6.  Contemporary issues and human rights.  He claims that I never apply Darwinian natural right reasoning to "issues that are at least remotely controversial in liberal democracies today," and I never consider the possibility that Darwinian natural right might apply to contemporary thought about human rights.

7.  Religion and Darwin.  He emphasizes that the most common criticism of Darwinian conservatism by conservatives is that Darwinian science subverts religious belief and thus subverts the morality that depends on religious belief, and he implies that I have given no good answer to that objection.

8.  Human Biodiversity.  Olsen has a good chapter on the history of American conservatives who argue that the evolutionary science of human biodiversity supports scientific racism and xenophobic nationalism; and although he does not state it as a criticism, some readers might wonder whether I have any good response to this argument for the evolutionary psychology of race differences.  Some of the scientific racists and nationalists that Olsen mentions have recently become prominent as leaders of the "alt-right" movement supporting Donald Trump.

In July, I wrote a series of posts responding to these eight criticisms.

In January, I continued to challenge Hayek's Freudian theory of civilization by looking at two groups of foraging bands that live in the tropical rainforests of South America--the Kayapo in Brazil and the Waorani in eastern Ecuador.  The Kayapo engage in what Hayek would call the "extended order of civilization," because they have trade relations with the commercial towns near their villages.  Thus, as Hayek said, they must "live in two worlds at once." But I see no evidence here that the Kayapo have had to suppress their genetically evolved instincts for tribal life to embrace the purely cultural traditions of civilization.  It seems clear that their instinctive desire to better their conditions of life has led them to participate in the market order of exchange and specialization while preserving as much of their small village life as they can.

Both the Kayapo and the Waorani have historically been extremely violent people, but coming under the control of government has reduced the violence, which seems to confirm Pinker's argument about the success of the "Hobbesian pacification process" when stateless foragers come under the legal system of a government.

Against this Hobbesian logic, some anarchists have argued that the liberty of living in anarchy is better than a predatory government, as illustrated by countries like Somalia.  But then, in many countries around the world today--such as Libya, Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan--the weakening or failure of central state power has promoted not individual liberty but the rule of clans that deny individual autonomy.  When there is no powerful central government to enforce law and order and provide public goods, people will not live as free individuals; rather they will revert back to an ancient tribal form of social order in which people are treated not as individuals but as members of their extended kinship groups.  There are good Darwinian reasons for this, having to do with the evolved instincts for kinship, nepotism, and tribalism based on extended real or fictive kinship. 

The moral codes of these clan societies will enforce group honor and suppress individual liberty.  For example, clan societies will enforce the blood feuds, the honor killings, and the attacks on infidels that liberals abhor.  The social order of liberal individualism will not prevail unless there is a powerful liberal state that will deny the customary legal systems of clan groups and protect the autonomy of individuals from coercion by clans.

That's the message of a brilliant new book--Mark Weiner's The Rule of the Clan.  Although he never directly mentions Hobbes, Weiner's argument is Hobbesian in making the case for a Liberal Leviathan.  He disputes the common libertarian assumption that liberty is strongest when the state is weakest or even absent.  While conceding that the state can be used for illiberal ends, he insists that individual freedom cannot exist if it is not enforced by a powerful liberal state.  He develops this argument by showing how weak or failed states have often created a vacuum of power that has been filled by the rule of clans that deny individual liberty.

In January, I wrote about this debate between the anarchists and the Hobbesians.  In June, I wrote about the Marxist critique of socialist anarchism.  I have written other posts on anarchism in 2010 (June) and 2015 (January and December). 

The possibility of anarchism is an important issue for any biopolitical science that must explain the evolution of government.  My argument is that every human society has some form of governance.  Even stateless foraging bands without the formal institutions of government and law have informal governance by leaders and customary law.  Classical liberals strive for limited government with a lot of private governance in civil society and the economy.

Part of the classical liberal argument for limited government is that there should be no governmental enforcement of religious belief, which should be a private matter left up to individual free choice.  And yet we might wonder whether Hobbes was right in arguing that no matter how much religious liberty and toleration is allowed, any government dedicated to keeping the peace must have the ultimate power to reject religious doctrines that promote violence, and thus to that extent the sovereign must be the "supreme pastor."  This argument was part of the second half of Hobbes's Leviathan that was devoted to interpreting the Bible, as if this was a political question.

In his interpreting the text of the Bible, Hobbes began a scholarly tradition of studying the Bible according to what would later be called the "historical-critical method" or "higher criticism."  In their history of this tradition of Biblical scholarship, Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker argue that this was a political interpretation of the Bible to advance classical liberal politics by secularizing politics and privatizing religious belief. 

In February, I wrote a post on this, arguing that this might in fact be a correct interpretation of the Bible--or at least of the New Testament--and this would support Roger Williams in his claim that the New Testament teaches religious liberty and separation of church and state.  In wrote a post on Williams in December of 2012.  Some of this writing went into my chapters on Hobbes and Locke in Political Questions.

But still Hobbes might have been right that the sovereign must always have the authority to act as "supreme pastor" in interpreting religious texts in ways that would keep the peace.  So, for example, after the 9/11 attack in 2001, President George W. Bush declared that the teachings of Islam in the Quran "are good and peaceful, and those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah."  Remarkably, Bush--a "born-again Christian"--was claiming to teach the truth of Islam and the Quran!  Bush seemed to be acting as the "supreme pastor."

But how far can a liberal government properly go in enforcing religious doctrine?  For example, would it be proper to enforce belief in the immortality of the soul with the reward of Heaven for the good and the punishment of Hell for the bad?  Is it plausible, as Locke argues in The Reasonableness of Christianity and as Plato argues in the Republic and the Laws, that belief in a final judgment by God with eternal rewards and punishments will motivate virtuous conduct, and therefore that the atheistic denial of this religious doctrine will subvert virtue?

I have written a series of posts on the evolution of Heaven and Hell (in April and May of 2010) and on the various forms of immortality (in October and November of 2013).  Although I have been generally skeptical about life after death, I recognize that there are good arguments for believing in such a possibility. 

The best statement of those arguments that I have seen is Dinesh D'Souza's Life After Death: The Evidence (2009).  What is most interesting for me is that D'Souza claims to rely primarily on purely rational scientific and philosophic thinking that does not depend on religious faith. In April, I wrote a series of five posts responding to his arguments.  I consider his reasoning based on near death experiences, Kantian dualism, the neuroscience of consciousness and free will, and the cosmic justice of Heaven and Hell as necessary for morality.

As I have indicated in my blog post on Wallace Stevens's poem "Sunday Morning," we should consider the possibility that living forever is not desirable, because living timelessly and changelessly would not be really living, and that in living the lives that we have, "death is the mother of beauty."  In another post (October of 2016), I suggested that the natural human lifespan--no more than about 115 years!--is enough.

Also in April, I wrote some posts on whether Steven Pinker has distorted the evidence for prehistoric war and for declining violence in modern history.  Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature has over 115 figures--an average of one for every 6 pages of text.  Many of these figures are visual presentations of data to support his arguments for prehistoric war and for a historical trend towards declining violence from the Stone Age to the present.  These figures are based on data found in thousands of cited sources.  This is one of his most impressive rhetorical techniques for persuading his readers that his reasoning is based on a meticulous statistical analysis of data.

Most readers will not take the trouble to read the sources for each figure to see whether Pinker is being accurate in his presentation of the data.  But some of his critics have done this for some of the figures, and they are accusing Pinker of manipulating the data to make it look more supportive of his argument that it really is.  Having looked into this myself, I think this is a fair criticism, although it's not fatal to his argument.  If Pinker had been totally honest about the gaps and uncertainties in the data, he could still have made a plausible argument for his conclusions. 

Some of my writing here went into my chapter on Pinker in Political Questions.  Some of these issues were discussed in March of 2014 at a Liberty Fund conference that I directed on "Liberty and Violence: From Auberon Herbert to Steven Pinker" at the Westward Look Resort in Tucson.

In March, I wrote some other posts on the questions that came up at the Liberty Fund conference. Is there a mutual relationship between increasing liberty and declining violence?  Does the history of violence show a pattern of decline?  If so, is this history of declining violence largely explained by a history of increasing liberty?  If so, is this a Darwinian process of biological and cultural evolution towards liberty and away from violence?  And if all this is so, does this provide historical confirmation for classical liberalism?

We saw that Auberon Herbert begins with the first principle of classical liberalism--self-ownership.  (In some previous posts, I have traced this liberal principle of self-ownership back to Richard Overton and John Locke.)  Herbert then defends the principle of liberty as opposed to the principle of force by arguing that liberty respects each person's ownership of himself and his property, while force allows some people to own the persons and property of others.  The fundamental question in human life is the choice between liberty and force--between a social life based on individual self-ownership and voluntary cooperation or a social life based on some people owning others and enforcing compulsory cooperation.  (In some previous posts, I have indicated how Abraham Lincoln's reasoning in the debate over slavery manifests this choice between liberty and force, and how Lincoln's choice for liberty of self-ownership constitutes his classical liberalism.)

As I have argued in some previous posts, this Lockean conception of individual personhood as embodied self-conscious awareness of, and emotional concern for, the survival and well-being of the body can now be confirmed as manifest in the human nervous system as a product of mammalian evolution.  If we follow Antonio Damasio's "somatic marker hypothesis" and Bud Craig's neuroanatomical explanation of conscious self-awareness in human beings, we can identify the self-ownership of the person as the activity of the anterior insular cortex of the brain in constituting the subjective awareness of the individual in caring for one's self and for others to whom one is attached.
Herbert sees the history of liberty and force as a progressive evolutionary history towards declining force and increasing liberty, because he thinks that liberty allows the free development of individual energy and genius through spontaneous enterprises of voluntary cooperation, which will be more productive than coercive systems based on force.  Thus, cultural evolution by natural selection favoring greater human survival and well-being will generally favor liberty over force.  This shows the "universal law of progress."  James Payne's History of Force develops this conception of history, and Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature elaborates Payne's history of declining violence and increasing liberty and peace.

This sort of thinking was most fully developed by Herbert Spencer.  In March, I wrote a post on Spencer, indicating that I had finally become convinced that modern evolutionary classical liberalism is rooted in the tradition of Spencer, and that the recent work of those like Matt Ridley, Jonathan Haidt, Michael Shermer, Paul Rubin, and Pinker confirms Spencer's rational optimism about the evolutionary trend across history towards increasing liberty and declining violence.

If evolutionary classical liberalism is correct, then liberal societies must be evolutionarily more adaptive, more functional, or more productive--economically, morally, and intellectually--than illiberal societies.  And, consequently, despite the occasional turns towards illiberal social orders, the arrow of history in the long run points to liberty.

Another post in March ("Classical Liberalism as Evolutionary Niche Construction") came out of the Liberty Fund conference.  At the conference, Frances White--the leading observer of bonobos in the wild--explained that in the wild, bonobo females serve a policing function, in that they intervene in fights to moderate conflicts through impartial mediation, because they benefit from living in a stable social order that is not disrupted by violence.

She also observed that bonobos--like all primates--show a range of personality types, so that some individuals have more violent temperaments than others, and consequently the occurrence of violence can depend on the contingency of whether there are such violent individuals in the group.  She said that many of the deaths of the males comes from "testosterone poisoning"--young males vigorously displaying their virility in the forest canopy can kill themselves by slamming into a tree.

She also said that if dominant males are grouped together in zoos without females who can moderate their male conflicts, then nasty fighting is likely to break out.  She explained then that what the females are doing in the wild groups in pacifying conflicts is "niche construction"--behavior that creates a social environment in which stable and peaceful cooperation is adaptive.

In response to her comment, I suggested that the history of classical liberalism is evolutionary niche construction, and that this is a big part of Pinker's argument: the history of classical liberal philosophy has created a cultural moral environment of liberalism in which peaceful cooperation and declining violence are adaptive.  This is what Deirdre McCloskey would identify as the work of rhetorical entrepreneurs in the marketplace of ideas who have used moral persuasion to create a liberal culture that honors the bourgeois virtues.

I have claimed that the arguments for evolutionary classical liberalism have recently been confirmed by the experimental evidence for evolutionary moral psychology.  As I indicated in a post in August, the experimental testing of how people respond to the famous "trolley problem" illustrates this.

These stories about the runaway trolley headed towards killing five people tied to the track might seem too cartoonish to be taken seriously as moral dilemmas.  But in recent decades, ever since they were first proposed by philosophers Philippa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thomson, they have become some of the most debated thought experiments among moral philosophers.  They have also been introduced into scientific experimentation conducted by philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists to test whether our moral intuitions about the trolley problem manifest an innate and universal moral sense shaped by human evolution and written into the neural circuitry of the brain.  This shows how a fundamental question in moral and political philosophy can be translated into experimentally testable propositions.  This trolleyology (as it has been called) has become a crucial part of the recent movement towards "experimental philosophy."

Of the hundreds of thousands of people all around the world who have participated in formal trolley problem surveys, most people (up to 90% in some studies) would divert the trolley in the Spur case, but they would not push the fat man in the Footbridge case.  What is most striking about this is that most people react differently to the two cases although pulling the switch and pushing the fat man have identical consequences--one person dies to save five.

Peter Singer concedes that the reluctance to push the fat man probably shows a naturally evolved emotional predisposition against intentionally and directly killing an innocent person, even when such killing will save more lives.  (This is Thomas Aquinas's principle of "double effect.") But for Singer that only shows that moral reason should overcome the irrationality of our evolved psychology.  The fact that most people would not push the fat man is irrelevant to the normative question of what they ought to do.  Unlike the empirical sciences (such as the evolutionary science and neuroscience of human nature), Singer insists, normative moral and political philosophy belongs to a realm of pure reason that transcends the natural world of observable experience.  For these reasons, Singer rejects John Rawls's claim that moral theory must be rooted in a moral psychology of moral intuitions.  Here is another manifestation of the contrast between the Aristotelian empiricist tradition of ethics (represented by the experimental philosophers) and the transcendentalist tradition (represented by Singer).

Most of the writing for this post went into my chapter on Rawls in Political Questions.

Similarly, much of my writing on Adam Smith and on how evolutionary moral psychology supports Smithian liberalism, in a series of posts from August to December, went into my chapter on Smith in Political Questions. 

The scholars of Adam Smith have long debated the Adam Smith Problem--the problem that Smith apparently contradicts himself by assuming in The Wealth of Nations that human beings are moved only by self-interest, while arguing in The Theory of Moral Sentiments that human beings are moved by their concern for others to act virtuously so that they can enjoy a mutual sympathy of sentiments.

I have argued, however--in some posts in August of 2012--that the new Darwinian social science overcomes the Adam Smith Problem by supporting the fundamental idea running through all of Smith's writing--the evolution of unintended order--and in doing that, it supports Smithian liberalism, or what Smith calls "the system of natural liberty."  That the evolution of unintended order is the unifying theme of all of Smith's writing has been well stated by James Otteson.  He contends that Smith applies a "market model" to explain the origin, development, and maintenance of all extended human institutions as unintended orders, which includes morality, the economy, law, and language.  What he calls "unintended order" is what Michael Polanyi and Friedich Hayek call "spontaneous order" and what Vernon Smith and others call "emergent order."  Otteson defines "unintended order" as "a self-enforcing, orderly institution created unintentionally by the free exchanges of individuals who desire to satisfy their own individual wants."

An unintended order is contrasted with an intentional order that has been rationally designed by some mind or group of minds for a deliberately planned purpose.  The contrast between these two kinds of order underlies a fundamental debate in social theory between the constructivists and the evolutionists: between those who think that a good social order must be deliberately and rationally designed for some foreseeable end-state and those who think a good social order arises through a process of free exchanges between individuals acting for individual ends with no overall end in mind.  Since the success of unintended order depends on individual liberty constrained only by rules of justice protecting life, liberty, and property, the idea of unintended order is the fundamental idea of classical liberalism in the Smithian tradition.

My posts on Smith in the fall of 2014 included posts on the debate over mirror neurons, Jonathan Haidt's libertarian moral psychology, Joshua Greene's "dual process theory" of moral reason and moral emotion in the brain, Joseph Cropsey's Straussian attack on Smith, Joe Henrich's use of cross-cultural experimental games in the "Roots of Human Socialtiy Project," the cultural evolution of Big Gods that made humans moral, "how Adam Smith predicted the financial crisis of 2008," and Deirdre McCloskey on the evolution of the bourgeois virtues.

The evolution of the bourgeois virtues secures what Smith called a "commercial society," which is the most desirable society in all of human history, because it tends to provide the fullest satisfaction of the 20 natural desires.  So, for example, four of the natural human desires of our evolved human nature are desires to love and be loved: parental care, conjugal love, familial bonding, and friendship.  And as McCloskey indicates, in our bourgeois economies, over half of the purchases that consumers make are on behalf of their children, their spouses, their parents, and their friends.  Bourgeois people are not solitary egoists, because, as Smith observed, "the chief part of human happiness arises from the consciousness of being beloved."

Similarly, we can see the natural desire for intellectual understanding expressed in bourgeois societies.  Scottish philosophers like Hume and Smith saw that the modern commercial society would provide the conditions for people like themselves to satisfy their longings for intellectual inquiry and philosophic friendship.  Socratic philosophy arose in the commercial empire of Athens.  And the arts and sciences are more widely available to more people in our commercial societies today than ever before in human history.

While McCloskey recognizes Smith's affirmation of the moral and intellectual virtues in the modern commercial society, Straussian scholars like Cropsey insist that for Smith commerce takes the place of virtue.

As McCloskey points out, for the first time in 250,000 years of human history, the majority of human beings in commercial societies are not living in a condition of grinding poverty that ruins their development.  More human beings are living longer, healthy lives than ever before in human history.  The population of the Earth has increased from less than one billion to over six billion, and amazingly most of those people are not starving.

But while most capitalist economists point to these material achievements of capitalism in securing longer, healthier lives for more human bodies, McCloskey also sees a third achievement: the bourgeois virtues have made us better people by deepening our human souls. 

Some readers of Smith might object that insofar as he seems to root virtue in self-love--in our concern for our good reputation in the eyes of others--this does not show the self-denial required for true virtue.  One of the common assumptions of the modern social sciences, biology, and moral philosophy is the distinction between self-love and altruism and the claim that true morality must be altruistic in its selflessness and thus free from any motivation by self-love.  In November, I wrote some posts explaining why I doubt this.  Having evolved to be both naturally selfish and naturally social animals, it seems to me, we extend ourselves into others for whom we feel some attachment.  Thus, our concern for ourselves includes a concern for others who have some connection to us.  Our other-regarding dispositions are extensions of our self-love.  This also means that absolutely disinterested, indiscriminate, and universal love is impossible.

Smith would seem to agree with this.  After all, in the index of The Wealth of Nations, self-love is identified as "the governing principle in the intercourse of human society."  And the reference for this is the famous passage about how we persuade the butcher, the brewer, and the baker to provide us our dinner.

This suggests to me that Smith is implicitly drawing on the ancient Aristotelian teaching that the good man loves himself and loves his friends as reflections of himself (Nicomachean Ethics, 1168a29-1170b20).  If so, then Smith is rejecting the Christian teaching of virtue as self-denial and affirming the virtue rooted in self-love that is taught by Bernard Mandeville.  Although Smith explicitly criticizes Mandeville, I see ways in which Smith implicitly agrees with Mandeville in his satirical rejection of Christian and rationalist conceptions of virtue as ascetic self-denial of all passions and desires.

All of this went into my chapter on Smith in Political Questions.

How Leo Strauss Predicted the Nietzschean Nihilism of Trump's Intellectuals

                                                                          Leo Strauss

Francis Fukuyama has published an essay for Persuasion on "A Chilling Prediction by Leo Strauss."  He reproduces an excerpt from a lecture on "German Nihilism" that Strauss gave in 1941 at the New School for Social Research.  In his prefatory remarks, Fukuyama says that we should find this text "chilling" because Strauss's intellectual analysis of the young German nihilists supporting Hitler's Nazism describes perfectly the thinking of those far-right intellectuals who today are supporting Trump.

Just like the German nihilists described by Strauss, Fukuyama observes, American far-right thinkers today--like Adrian Vermeule, Patrick Deneen, Curtis Yarvin, and Costin Alamariu ("Bronze Age Pervert")--want to destroy liberalism because it is morally degrading in promoting the soft hedonism of the open society rather than the hard heroism of the closed society. 

This points to Strauss's primary claim in his lecture:  "German nihilism desires the destruction of modern civilization as far as modern civilization has a moral meaning." He explained: 

It is a moral protest.  That protest proceeds from the conviction that the internationalism inherent in modern civilization, or, more precisely, that the establishment of a perfectly open society which is as it were the goal of modern civilization, and therefore all aspirations directed toward that goal, are irreconcilable with the basic demands of moral life.  That protest proceeds from the conviction that the root of all moral life is essentially and therefore eternally the closed society; from the conviction that the open society is bound to be, if not immoral, at least amoral: the meeting ground of seekers of pleasure, of gain, of irresponsible power, indeed of any kind of irresponsibility and lack of seriousness.

Strauss saw that the intellectual godfather of this German nihilism is Friedrich Nietzsche--the Nietzsche who scorned the ignoble pleasure-seeking life of the "Last Man" based on the slave morality dictated by the Christian principle of the equal dignity of all human beings, which denied the master morality of the few noble masters fit to rule over the multitude of inferior human beings.  In foreseeing the future emergence of a new nobility of those few superhuman higher men entitled to enslave the many subhuman lower men, Nietzsche has had a seductive appeal to those young nihilists who imagine themselves becoming the masters at the top of the natural order of rank in a new hierarchical closed society at war with its liberal enemies.

As Strauss indicated, what made this intellectual attitude "nihilistic" was that while it was clear about what it denied--liberalism--it was not clear about what it affirmed because its preferred alternative to liberalism was vague.  Since its No was more emphatic than its Yes, it was nihilistic in its passion for destruction--for Nothing--without offering any vision of what exactly would replace liberalism.

Similarly, Fukuyama suggests, today's "post-liberals" have no coherent conception of what should replace liberalism.  On the one hand, Deneen and Vermeule seem to want something like Catholic integralism--a Catholic theocracy enforcing a religious morality.  On the other hand, Yarvin and Alamariu are atheists who want to return to some kind of pagan hierarchy enforced by a strong, even tyrannical, government.  All that the two sides have in common is their hatred of liberalism.

This hatred of liberalism is also what moved the German nihilists to support Nazism.  And, as Fukuyama indicates, Strauss seemed to clearly reject Nazism in his 1941 lecture when he identified it as the "lowest, most provincial, most unenlightened and most dishonorable form" of German nihilism.  But still, Strauss argued, liberals needed to understand the nihilistic roots of illiberal politics in order to see the power of the Nietzschean nihilistic critique of liberalism.  Fukuyama thinks the same is true today in America: liberals need to understand why the American far-right intellectuals hate liberalism and why that hatred of liberalism as rooted in Nietzschean nihilism has such an appeal for many people today--particularly, the young men supporting Trump.  

Actually, Fukuyama does not explicitly mention Trump in his remarks, but the implicit reference to Trump is clear.  It should be noted, however, that while Fukuyama explains the far-right intellectuals supporting Trump as illiberal nihilists, he has explained Trump himself as motivated not by any ideology but by what Nietzsche called ressentiment--"acute resentment of others based on wounded pride, perceived disregard, fears of inadequacy, and a desire to exact revenge on those who had earlier failed to pay adequate respect."  I have explained this resentment as an expression of Trump's chimpanzee grandiose narcissism.  Moreover, Fukuyama has suggested, the core of the MAGA movement is mostly moved not by any ideology--like the illiberal nihilism of the far-right intellectuals--but by the shared resentment of people who think they have not been respected by those who belong to the elites and look down on them with disdain.  This explains why Trump's staunchest supporters will remain loyal to him even when they suffer economically from his policies--such as high tariffs that will harm many of Trump's voters.

I agree with everything Fukuyama says here.  By the way, I also agree with Fukuyama's defense of liberalism as first announced in his 1989 "End of History?" article.  

But I do think Fukuyama misses three crucial flaws in Strauss's reasoning that should come out of a careful reading of his "German Nihilism" lecture that are pertinent to our understanding of, and our response to, both German and American nihilism.  

First, Fukuyama does not notice Strauss's quiet endorsement of the "young nihilists" that Will Altman and others have identified as evidence that Strauss was attracted to the nihilism of the Nazis.  

Second, Fukuyama also does not notice that in naming Nietzsche as the godfather of illiberal nihilism, Strauss failed to recognize Nietzsche's support for liberalism in the writings of his middle period (particularly, Human, All Too Human).  

Third, Strauss had also failed to see how philosophic proponents of liberalism like John Locke and Adam Smith had shown that liberalism cultivates the moral and intellectual virtues, which refutes the charge of the illiberal nihilists that liberalism must be ignoble and degrading.

Since I have previously elaborated each of these points, I will only briefly summarize them here with links to previous posts and references to the 4th edition of Political Questions (PQ4).

STRAUSS'S NAZISM?

Fukuyama's excerpt from "German Nihilism" does not include this passage:

I have tried to circumscribe the intellectual and moral situation in which a nihilism emerged which was not in all cases base in its origin.  Moreover, I take it for granted that not everything to which the young nihilists objected was unobjectionable, and that not every writer or speaker whom they despised, was respectable. . . . Let us then not hesitate to look for one moment at the phenomenon which I called nihilism, from the point of view of the nihilists. . . . A new reality is in the making; it is transforming the whole world; in the meantime there is: nothing, but--a fertile nothing.

Notice that in taking "the point of view of the nihilists," Strauss actually goes a long way towards endorsing their position: some (most?) of that to which the nihilists objected really was objectionable, and some (most?) of the writers and speakers whom they despised really were despicable.  This is one piece of evidence cited by Will Altman for his provocative claim that Strauss supported Nazi nihilism in its attack on liberalism (PQ4, 491-99).

In "German Nihilism," Strauss took "the point of view of the nihilists" in explaining their argument that an illiberal "closed society" was ennobling, while a liberal "open society" was degrading.  Any reader of Strauss will know that he often embraced this idea that every healthy society--and particularly, the premodern societies like Athens and Sparta--was a closed society as opposed to the modern open societies of liberalism that inevitably became corrupt.  Actually, as I have argued, Athens was a much more open and liberal society than Strauss was willing to admit--that's why the philosophical schools of Plato and Aristotle could flourish in Athens but not in Sparta.

Strauss did not allow "German Nihilism" to be published while he was alive.  It was not published until 1999 (in Interpretation), which was 26 years after his death in 1973.  Was this because he feared that it was too open in suggesting his sympathy for German nihilism?

Similarly, Strauss's praise of Martin Heidegger in "Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism" was not published until 1989 (in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism), 16 years after his death.  Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in 1933.  He offered vigorous philosophic defenses of Hitler and the Nazi Party.  And he never apologized for his support of the Nazis--right up to his death in 1976.

Strauss had been a student of Heidegger, and he praised Heidegger as the greatest thinker of the twentieth century.  In "Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism," he left his reader doubting whether there was any good refutation of Heidegger's Nazi attack on liberalism:

All rational liberal philosophic positions have lost their significance and power.  One may deplore this, but I for one cannot bring myself to clinging to philosophic positions which have been shown to be inadequate.  I am afraid that we shall have to make a very great effort in order to find a solid basis for rational liberalism.  Only a great thinker could help us in our intellectual plight.  But here is the great trouble: the only great thinker in our time is Heidegger.

Notice how emphatic Strauss is in using the word "I" here.  He once explained that one form of esoteric writing was to use the word "we" to seemingly endorse a common opinion, rather than saying "I," which suggested that one was truly endorsing that opinion. 

This is part of the evidence supporting Altman's argument that Strauss saw himself as the culmination of the "Third Wave of Modernity" that overthrew liberalism--first Nietzsche, then Heidegger, and finally Strauss.

Although I am not fully persuaded by Altman, I am persuaded that he has proven that Strauss often implied some endorsement of the Nazi attack on liberalism, and he never publicly and emphatically rejected Nazi nihilism and affirmed liberalism--as did some of his friends like Hans Jonas.  That was a moral and intellectual failure on the part of Strauss. 

NIETZSCHE'S DARWINIAN LIBERALISM

Another of Strauss's failures was in saying that Nietzsche initiated the Third Wave of Modernity that would lead to the illiberal nihilism of Nazism.  Although this might be true for the early and late writings of Nietzsche that were so often praised by the Nazis, it is not true for the writings of the middle period, and particularly Human, All Too Human.

In this book, Nietzsche defended a Darwinian liberalism that rejected many of the main ideas of his later writing--such as the celebration of the Ubermensch (the Superman or Overman), which became a theme for the Nazis.  

One can make a good case (as Bruce Detwiler does) for "Dionysian aristocratic radicalism" as the political teaching of Nietzsche in his early and late writings.  But one also needs to recognize that Nietzsche's endorsement of liberal democracy rooted in Darwinian evolution in the writings of his middle period contradicts what he says in his other writings.  Then, if one compares those two teachings, one can make a good argument that Nietzsche's Darwinian aristocratic liberalism is morally and intellectually superior to his Dionysian aristocratic radicalism (PQ4, 457-60).  This is Nietzsche's defense of liberalism against the attack of the German nihilists.

Strauss failed to see this.

LOCKE AND SMITH ON LIBERAL VIRTUES

Strauss also failed to see how Locke and Smith had made powerful arguments for liberalism's moral and intellectual virtues.  One of Strauss's most influential pieces of writing--particularly among the far-right intellectual critics of liberalism--is his interpretation of Locke in Natural Right and History, which presents Lockean liberalism as promoting a vulgar and soul-deadening soft hedonism, which Strauss famously called "a joyless quest for joy."  This is the Locke that "post-liberals" like Patrick Deneen have scorned.

But as I have argued, this ignores much of what Locke wrote about how a free society secures the liberty that allows for the cultivation of moral and intellectual excellence--including the freedom to live the philosophic life (for people like Strauss!) (PQ4, 489-91).  So, while critics of liberalism like Deneen insist that Lockean liberalism teaches "pursuit of immediate gratification" and the "absence of restraints upon one's desires," he says nothing about how Locke contradicts this claim in Some Thoughts Concerning Education.  In that book, Locke stresses the importance of parents educating their children so that they have a sense of shame in caring about their good reputation (secs. 56, 61, 78).  Locke says that "the great principle and foundation of all virtue and worth is placed in this, that a man is able to deny himself his own desires, cross his own inclinations, and purely follow what reason directs as best though the appetite lean the other way" (sec. 33). "It seems plain to me that the principle of all virtue and excellency lies in a power of denying ourselves the satisfaction of our own desires where reason does not authorize them" (sec. 38). Children must be taught that "covetousness and the desire of having in our possession and under our dominion more than we have need of" is "the root of all evil" (sec. 110). 

Above all, Locke insists, children must be taught and habituated to show "civility"--respect and good will to all people (secs. 66-67, 70, 109, 117, 143-44). Here Locke's emphasis on the need for "civility" is part of what Norbert Elias identified as the "civilizing process" promoted by early modern liberalism to overcome the incivility, violence, and corrupt manners of medieval pre-modern Europe.  Deneen and Strauss are silent about all of this.

They are also silent about Smith's argument about how a liberal society--"allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice"--promotes the moral and intellectual virtues.  Strauss said almost nothing about Smith, but Strauss's thinking about liberal political philosophy shaped the interpretation of Smith developed by Joseph Cropsey, Strauss's student and colleague.  Cropsey claimed that in Smith's "commercial society," commerce takes the place of virtue.  But as I have indicated, Cropsey ignored or played down everything Smith said--particularly, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments--about how the moral and intellectual virtues are cultivated in a free society (PQ4, 340-48).

Moreover, Cropsey was completely silent about how Charles Darwin saw that Smith's moral philosophy was confirmed by his scientific theory of moral evolution, and how this has been deepened by the evolutionary studies of morality over the 150 years since Darwin's Descent of Man (PQ4, 316-28).

Strauss and the Straussians have failed to see how a careful reading of Nietzsche, Locke, and Smith can reveal the nobility of liberalism in securing the liberty that makes virtue possible, thus refuting the moral critique of liberalism by the illiberal nihilists, including those today who try to provide the intellectual justification for Trump's illiberalism.