The Three Headed Dragon of Political Philosophy

Or: on the interpretation of three 20's century philosophers to Thomas Hobbes and his influence over them.

Our story begins with a young Jewish scholar named Leo Strauss. In 1932, for understandable reasons, Strauss was forced to leave Germany for Paris and eventually London. However, leaving one's homeland is no simple matter, especially for someone whose "profession" revolves around philosophy. Strauss had to rely on letters of recommendation. He received these from two prominent figures: Ernst Cassirer, who was also his doctoral advisor, and Carl Schmitt, with whom he had a lengthy correspondence. By the time Strauss arrived in London, his philosophical positions—later recognized mainly in the U.S.—were fairly well formed, as was his engagement with political philosophy. Yet, as an exiled Jew, he still needed to earn a living. Thanks to his excellent letters of recommendation and his placement in England, he began working on a treatise regarding the emergence of "the only complete political philosophy to come out of England" (as Oakeshott put it), Hobbes' Leviathan.

Hobbes was not a new subject for Strauss. His thesis regarding the emergence of Leviathan as reflecting a rather arbitrary turning point between the classical tradition of political philosophy and what he considered the modern tradition had been developing long before he wrote the book. Strauss' ideas about Hobbes can already be found in his excellent correspondence with Alexandre Kojève (a figure who stands quite well on his own), or alternatively in his correspondence with Carl Schmitt. The latter is particularly interesting from a historical perspective. It appears that Strauss had a massive influence on Schmitt concerning the shaping of the text of The Concept of the Political, and based on the correspondence we have, it’s hard not to suspect that Schmitt's later engagement with Hobbes also stemmed from Strauss' insights. For both Schmitt and Strauss, the historical return to Hobbes simultaneously marks a return to the moment of birth of modern or liberal political philosophy. The historical discussion effectively allows, beneath the lines and sometimes above them, a substantive discussion about how much truth there is in modern political philosophy.

But why is the latter correspondence particularly interesting historically? Because, as you can understand, the correspondence began in quote friendly terms, sufficiently for Schmitt to recommend Strauss, which essentially arranged Strauss' career in London. However, as the political situation progressed, it seemed less suitable for a Nazi in a high position at the Ministry of Justice, like Carl Schmitt, to correspond with a Jew. So what happened—at least for a certain period—was a one-sided exchange of letters from Strauss and the publication of special editions of The Concept of the Political, which corrected the text exactly, with precision, in the places Strauss sent remarks and questions. This was discovered by Heinrich Meier, a student of Strauss, who published his special study on the subject in one of the few books that is both an excellent philological and historical work (The Hidden Dialogue, 2006).

Just to break down the disagreement, Strauss believed that Schmitt's philosophy, contrary to its innovative appearance, is nothing but the political expression of Hobbes' philosophy. While Hobbes famously asserted that "man is a wolf to man" and that the state of nature is a state of war of every individual against every other individual, with the state being an artificial construct meant to "solve" the problems posed by the state of nature—Schmitt believed that the essence of the political is the war of states against each other. The possibility of civil war is essentially what prompts individuals to band together to form a state of law. Interestingly, Hobbes implies that the "state of nature" persists in relations between states. The political, an artificial construct meant to overcome the state of nature, does not exist in relations between states. For Schmitt, however, it is precisely the political, the natural, that reveals itself in relations between states - the state of affairs among individuals within a given state tends to obscure it. The sharpest difference that Strauss notices between the theories (before Schmitt himself articulates similar differences in his own work on Hobbes) is that in Hobbes, the state cannot justly demand the individual to die for it. The foundation of the state arises from the individual's need to preserve their life. In contrast, Schmitt argues that the state can demand individuals to die for it as a matter of justice.

The interesting point in Strauss' interpretation of Schmitt is that Strauss labels Hobbes' position as "the position of civilization" and Schmitt's as "the political position." Up until this point, there is common ground. The point that Schmitt would later develop is that Hobbes' doctrine opened the door to political theories of individualism, pluralism, and the primacy of universal law—by essentially being the first to perform a "privatization" of the political as he understands it in favor of the realm and logic of the private. The state, for him, was "designed by reason." In fact, Hobbes ethically advanced the peaceful lives that characterize liberalism and indirectly led to the political decline of the modern world (and, of course, of the Weimar Republic). In reality, Strauss shows Schmitt how, contrary to his previous admiration for Hobbes as a thinker closest to him, Hobbes is the thinker furthest from him in a manner he would realise only later on in his career, as mentioned.

Among other things, Schmitt changes the superlatives he attributed to Hobbes in The Concept of the Political from "the greatest, and perhaps the only, systematic political thinker" in the first edition to "a great and systematic thinker" in the 1933 edition, who "despite his extreme individualism, maintains such a strong 'pessimistic' view of man that he keeps the concept of the political alive." In fact, Schmitt preserves his principled position but accepts Strauss' historical perspective regarding Hobbes' place in relation to it.

As mentioned, Strauss develops his reading of Hobbes as part of a broader project to understand political philosophy. From his perspective, Hobbes operates at a critical moment when traditional political philosophy, particularly Aristotelian philosophy (in his view), is losing its power in light of the rise of new science and yet no alternative exists. According to Strauss, Hobbes bases liberal political philosophy not on a new cosmological understanding but on an "objective moral feeling" (fear of violent death) from which every action derived is justified in an objective manner. The way Strauss anchors this theory of his on Hobbes is extraordinarily philological: he shows that as Hobbes matures, he increasingly tries to base himself on the new science - and not that the new science esposed or nesseciated his political philosophy.

Simultaneously, he advances an interesting argument, primarily based on Hobbes' introduction to his English translation of Thucydides' The Peloponnesian War, that before Leviathan, Hobbes had already developed his understanding of political philosophy independently of his (later) recognition of the "new science." At this point, I must admit that I have not yet read his entire book on Hobbes to do him full justice.

Strauss' idea is that to some extent, if his thesis about Hobbes is correct, the development of modern civilization towards the ideology of liberalism is not a necessity. It is a product of specific historical circumstances, and one can certainly propose an alternative based on classical philosophy (with arguments that change throughout his career) to liberalism. His correspondence with Schmitt contains, unsurprisingly, a sophisticated critique of Schmitt's doctrine in this vain—and at this point, I once again strongly urge you, if you have not yet read it, to read Meier's book. In the meantime, it can be said that the commonality between Schmitt and Strauss is a certain reading of the history of ideas: both essentially accept that the history of modern political philosophy is a history that is essentially monolithic, a fact justified by the reality that the ideology that ultimately prevailed, in various forms, around the world, is the ideology of liberalism, which relies on modern political philosophy for its justification. Since both understand the domination of liberalism as a certain form of decline, they try to propose alternatives, and as mentioned, they greatly differ on what those desired alternatives are.

However, what’s interesting is that this story has a third side. Enter Michael Oakeshott. Strauss published his philological study on Hobbes in 1935 (in German) and a year later translated and published it in English. That same year, Oakeshott wrote a highly respectful review of Strauss's thesis. Undoubtedly, there’s a great deal of irony in this review regarding Strauss's argument on Hobbes, but there's also a sense of "impasse" concerning some of Strauss's conclusions about Hobbes's personal development. Many of Oakeshott's arguments, by the way, fall short in a sense because he likely overlooked a footnote Strauss included in the book’s preface. It’s not that Oakeshott didn't read the book carefully—on the contrary, he seems to have read it very thoroughly and understood it deeply. But, in truth, during his research, Strauss was corresponding with Kojève, who likely posed challenges to Strauss similar to those Oakeshott later raised publicly. Strauss, however, responded to Kojève that while his concerns were valid, he (Strauss) had found manuscripts in an English library that likely belonged to Hobbes himself from his earlier years, and these manuscripts effectively supported his claims about Hobbes's early turn toward political philosophy before he became acquainted with "the new science." For reasons I couldn’t quite understand, Strauss only mentions this discovery in a footnote in the preface. Presumably, the book was mostly written before Strauss found this "smoking gun." Nowadays, from what I understand, there’s little dispute about the authenticity of Strauss's identification of these manuscripts as Hobbes's.

But setting philological matters aside, while Oakeshott understands Strauss's early thesis regarding Hobbes’s turn to political philosophy, he himself offers a slightly different reading of the history of political philosophy (which he holds in no less esteem than Strauss or Schmitt). According to Oakeshott, with Hobbes, we are dealing with the beginning of modern political philosophy, which emphasizes individualism, will over law (or law anchored in will), and Epicureanism. In his critique of Strauss, Oakeshott is forced to concede that Hobbes himself did not develop any theory of will and that his supposed Epicureanism is likely just a fanciful construct. Oakeshott envisions the tradition of modern political philosophy as a revival of the idea of "natural law" in a Stoic version, combined with an Epicurean metaphysics. At this stage (Oakeshott was quite young), he was probably thinking mainly about later French thinkers, but he still tended to place Hobbes in a central role.

The interesting aspect of Oakeshott’s claim appears almost ten years later when he is mature enough to solidify his historical position. In 1946, when Oakeshott writes his introduction to Leviathan, he presents a different analysis of the central traditions that make up Western political philosophy: (1) a tradition focused on the relationship between nature and reason, (2) a tradition focused on the relationship between will and artificiality, and (3) a tradition focused on "rational will." The central work representing the first tradition, which he believes survived unchallenged into modernity, is Plato's The Republic. The central work of the second tradition is Hobbes's Leviathan. The third tradition is the newest, originating in the 18th century, and characterizes Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. I won’t expand here on his view of each of these traditions, but his intuition is clear.

I find this point intriguing because it seems to me that Oakeshott, in his ongoing critique of the "rational will," the technocratic force meant to govern the state—a representation of the third tradition—positions himself as a proponent of the second tradition. A tradition of unexplained individual wills and artificial relations that sustain the social fabric. Furthermore, for those who know how to read between the lines, Oakeshott explicitly references Strauss’s position ten years later, this time attempting to challenge Strauss's reading of Hobbes from a new angle. Oakeshott questions how connected Hobbes’s naturalistic theory of the world is to his political philosophy. According to Strauss, it is an external factor. Oakeshott’s solution to this dilemma is to interpret Hobbes’s philosophy not based on a "system" in the German sense but as a "method"—a certain movement of thought that weaves one idea into another through causation. Thus, Oakeshott seemingly resolves the dilemma of whether Hobbes’s naturalism is integral to his political philosophy. Hobbes isn’t committed to naturalism; he’s committed to certain ideas about nature relevant to his argument in specific contexts. His method is simply what connects these various ideas—stronger in some places, weaker in others.

In general, I think there’s much value in reading Oakeshott’s Introduction to Leviathan. His interest is by no means antiquarian. As hinted earlier, Oakeshott constructs his own adversary—the tradition of rational will—in a way entirely different from how Strauss and Schmitt interpreted history. In this brief account, I’ve tried to outline an intuition that, in my view, requires much more serious research.

There are quite a few well-known Hobbes interpreters from the 20th century that I haven’t mentioned here, simply because they don’t relate to the charming little story at the heart of this summary. Nevertheless, anyone looking to specialize in Hobbes to better understand modern political philosophy—whether through reading Hobbes himself and then entering the 20th-century discussion ‘on’ Hobbes or through studying Hobbes’s influence on the history of philosophy proper—will find it rewarding.