“On Political Philosophy” by Leo Strauss

This book is taken from a series of lectures Strauss gave for a class at the University of Chicago in the winter of 1965. Each chapter transcribes Strauss pontificating for about an hour on the ideas of history’s great philosophers, judiciously interjecting his own opinions, and then being grilled by a small group of students for clarifications and insights into his esoteric ways. Strauss begins with the positivism espoused by Auguste Comte. He points out that Comte brings a religious righteousness to his idea of scientism. “Comte doesn’t hesitate to draw the conclusion… that there cannot be toleration. Universal toleration for every opinion is defensible as a transitional thing, for the pulling down of the untenable old views and institutions so that room is created for the emergence of the new and final…. [In Comte’s program] systematic tolerance cannot exist, and never really has existed, except regarding opinions regarded as indifferent or questionable.” Comte’s science explicitly leaves no room for the opinions of the masses. “Comte overestimates the power of reason or of ideas…. Comte is clearly antidemocratic…. His antidemocratic stand is based on his belief in the incompetence of the masses, and he puts his trust in the men at the top, the captains of banks and industry, controlled in a way by the men of science.”

Strauss explains the difference in the accumulation of knowledge in the fields of philosophy and the natural sciences. He begins by stating that Rousseau was not so special. “Rousseau implies that his political philosophy differs more or less from the teaching of all his predecessors…. In fact, every great political philosopher did this—that is, he said: Here I present the political truth…. Many great political philosophers teach very different things about the just order. One can say we have no political philosophy, but only political philosophies. There is not one edifice impressing us by its unanimity, so to say, or quasi-unanimity, as modern science in a way does…. Here we have anarchy…. In Hegel’s words, the individual—and he meant by that not only thoughtless individuals, but the most thoughtful men, the philosophers—is the son of his time, and not in the way in which he shaves or wears clothes, but in his highest and most sublime and abstruse thoughts.” According to the historicists, man is trapped by history more than by nature. “We modern men are by virtue of this “progress” in need of historical studies in order to see again the hidden foundations of our thought.” 

Strauss devotes much time in separating the difference of meaning between the ancients and the moderns, even when, superficially, their ideas seem similar, based on the inadequacy of definition and translation. “Political philosophy as the quest for the just or the good society has become incredible in our age owing to positivism and historicism…. Positivism leads to the contempt or neglect of the political philosophies of the past. Historicism, on the other hand, must cultivate the history of political philosophy, although it can no longer recognize the possibility of political philosophy proper.” (That is, the idea that there is one greatest-good polis, for all times and for all peoples.) The fact that there is only one greatest-good does not mean, however, that philosophy does not stand on the shoulders of giants. “Every attempt at rational knowledge, philosophic or scientific, consists in replacing opinions by knowledge. This cannot be contentiously done if one does not first know the opinions from which one starts. But these opinions are only partly our opinions. Their most important part, or their largest part at least, is inherited. What we regard as our opinions consists to a considerable extent of the sediments of past discussions, discussions which were conscious, which were the focus of attention in earlier centuries, and now we live on their results.”

For Strauss, the moderns originate in Hobbes and, even earlier, if less overtly, in Machiavelli. “Here we have a decisive opposition of the two considerations: a political teaching which takes its bearings by how men ought to live [the ancient position], and a teaching which takes its bearings by how men do live [the modern position].” But are these two positions really that different? “What is characteristic of men like Machiavelli and Hobbes is that they claim to oppose a realistic teaching to the idealistic teaching of the past…. But we must not forget for one moment that what they tried to do was to erect on this so-called realistic basis an ideal order…. The perfection is much lower than that aspired to by Plato, but perfection it is.”

One difference of the ancients and moderns was their distinction between natural duties and natural rights. “In the traditional doctrine, especially as presented by Thomas Aquinas, these natural inclinations of man give rise primarily to duties…. [For Hobbes,] the fundamental phenomenon is not any duty but the right to preserve myself, and any duties which come are derivative from the foundational right…. That people should do their duties, one can only hope. But that they should be concerned with their rights, and fight for them: this is a much safer, more realistic, assumption.” Man generalizes his rights into universals through the means of reason. “In the moment I conceive my desire in terms of a law, I become already more reasonable, to say the least, than I was before…. By nature, men are unequal according to Rousseau, but the social contract replaces the natural inequality by conventional equality, and that is justice…. As long as the classical tradition lasted, a distinction was made between the natural law and positive law…. The political philosophy founded by Socrates, constituted itself by establishing the view that the just and the noble are fundamentally natural and not merely conventional.”

Strauss does not believe in the prevailing modern strain of historical relativism. He believes that the purpose of philosophy is to search for the truth. Political philosophy helps man, through its conception of the just society, to build ideal social institutions and traditions. “We have no higher duty and no more pressing duty than to remind ourselves and our students of political greatness, human greatness, of the peaks of human excellence. For we are supposed to train ourselves and others in seeing things as they are, and this means above all in seeing their greatness and their misery, their excellence and their vileness, their nobility and their baseness, and therefore never to mistake mediocrity, however brilliant, for true greatness.”

“The Museum of Innocence” by Orhan Pamuk (translated by Maureen Freely)

This is a novel about love and patience. It is also a story about class, propriety, gender relations, religious norms, and traditional values. It is also one weird book. The story, above all, is one about an all consuming obsession. Set in Istanbul in the second half of the twentieth century, the novel details the milieu of the city’s nouveau riche and fading aristocracy. Kemal, the narrator, set to marry the daughter of a prestigious civil servant, Sibel, becomes enraptured by a poor distant relative, Fusan, whom he happens upon at a boutique. “Even all these years later I remember that Sibel spoke to me sweetly. Sibel was fun, and clever, and sympathetic, and I knew that with her at my side I would be fine, not just then but for the rest of my life. Late that night, after I had taken her home, I walked for a long time through the dark and empty streets, thinking about Fusan. What I couldn’t stop thinking about, what perturbed me was not just that Fusan had given me her virginity; it was that she had shown such resolve in doing so. There had been no coyness, no indecision, not even when she was taking off her clothes.” From the start of the affair, the mood of the book reveals that things will not end well for anyone. “It was during these days that I first began to feel fissures opening in my soul, wounds of the sort that plunge some men into a deep, dark, lifelong loneliness for which there is no cure.” When Kemal and Fusan become estranged, he sinks to the nadir of his despair, comforting himself with any relic from his apartment that she had happened to touch. “As the pain I felt wondering whether Fusan might come grew less intense each day, I sometimes convinced myself that I was slowly growing accustomed to her absence, but there was no truth to this, none at all. It was simply that I was growing more adept at distracting myself with the happiness I found in objects.” For a time still engaged to Sibel, Kemal obsessively ruminates on the nature of love. “I would entertain the hopeful thought that all serious and honorable men who happened to fall passionately in love went through the same things I did.” The objects of his obsession consume Kemal’s existence. “The power of things inheres in the memories they gather up inside them, and also in the vicissitudes of our imagination, and our memory—of this there is no doubt.” What could be a thoroughly pitiful and depressing tale is interspersed with just a shimmer of light as Kemal struggles on with life. “I had already had intimations that my passion for Fusan would ultimately turn into such a story of stubborn introversion. My love for her, my obsession, or whatever one could call it—it had rendered me incapable of diverting myself onto a path that would lead me to sharing this world freely with another. Even in the early days I’d known deep in my heart that mutuality could never happen in the world I’ve been describing, and so I’d turned inward, to seek Fusan there. I think Fusan knew, too, that one day I would find her inside me. In the end everything would be fine.”

“Barley Patch” by Gerald Murnane

The stories nested within stories within stories sometimes makes for a challenging read. The layers peel back and forth so that sometimes the reader struggles to figure out which level of the story he is on. Murnane references previous details in the story by making the reader count the paragraphs he has just read backwards as markers. “I reported at the end of the fifth paragraph before the previous paragraph that I was often afraid of the character known as Aunt Bee.” Murnane also blends nonfiction and fiction, all the while claiming that everything is fiction. “I should remind the reader that every sentence hereabouts is part of a work of fiction.” Maybe it is and the reader should take him at his word. The narrator of this novel is never Murnane, the author, but just a fictional character in this novel. Perhaps.

This novel is a meditation on the monkish practice of reading and writing fiction well. “Many years passed before I began to understand that looking at line after line of text is only a small part of reading; that I might need to write about a text before I could say that I had fully read it.” Murnane’s thoughts, at first, seem like they might be a little bit off. “Several times while I was writing the previous pages, I recalled the statement: fiction is the art of suggestion. This statement allows me to suppose that a person without imagination might still succeed in writing fiction so long as his or her reader is able to imagine.” He sometimes less than subtly interjects his opinions on what constitutes good fiction. “I have long forgotten whether or not the narrator of The Glass Spear was one of those unconvincing personages commonly occurring in fiction of the twentieth century: those narrators who claim to know the thoughts and feelings of more than one character in the work of fiction.” Murnane’s novel also tries to get at the heart of what fiction is all about. “During all the years while I had been a reader of fiction and while I had sometimes struggled to write fiction—during all those years, I had wanted to learn what places appeared in the mind of one or another fictional character whenever he or she stared past the furthest places mentioned in the text that had seemed to give rise to him or to her; what places such a character thought of during the hours or the days that were never reported in the text; what places such a character dreamed about…. Now, I was free to suppose what I had often suspected: many a so-called fictional character was not a native of some or another fictional text but of a further region never yet written about…. Now, I was justified in believing in the existence of places beyond the places that I had read about or had written about: of a country on the far side of fiction…. I understood for the first time that a personage mentioned in a work of fiction is capable of devising a seeming territory more extensive and more detailed by far than the work itself.” It sometimes all blurs together and gets very meta. “I find myself now in a strange situation. Nearly sixteen years ago, I stopped writing fiction. A few years later, I wrote a piece of fiction intended to explain why I had so stopped. Now, more than ten years later again, I am trying to compose a passage of fiction that might explain my explanatory piece.” This novel is that fiction.

“Private Truths, Public Lies” by Timur Kuran

Kuran is currently a Professor of Economics at Duke University. He proposes a theory of “preference falsification, the act of misrepresenting one’s genuine wants under perceived social pressures…. Preference falsification aims specifically at manipulating the perceptions others hold about one’s motivations or dispositions…. A phrase that captures the meaning of preference falsification exactly is “living a lie.”… If one distinguishing characteristic of preference falsification is that it brings discomfort to the falsifier, another is that it is a response to real or imagined social pressures to convey a particular preference.” Kuran proposes that preference falsification is ubiquitous, both in totalitarian regimes and in democracies. He suggests that “to acknowledge the universality of preference falsification would call into serious question some of the alleged virtues of democracy.” However, “the proclivity to engage in preference falsification depends crucially on the institutional context.” Preference falsification occurs when an individual wants to appear to be in step with public opinion. However, “insofar as we overrate the genuineness of public opinion, we will overestimate its permanence and adapt more readily to its apparent shifts. Therefore public opinion may be very sensitive to signs that it is in flux.” Public opinion also exerts pressures well beyond what might be legally permissible in a society. “The pressure of public opinion may make minorities refrain from exercising their constitutional rights to dissent. As a practical matter, institutional checks and balances do not even guarantee that majorities will exercise their expressive rights. Even without government coercion, majorities might submit to the wishes of vociferous minorities. Protections against government tyranny do not prevent societies from tyrannizing themselves through the force of public opinion.”

Even when private opinions do change, there is a tendency not to reveal those altered preferences publicly because of status quo bias. “”Individuals would rather not be the first to challenge the status quo. Under the prevailing reputational incentives, people will not switch for fear that others will not…. Public opinion may thus outlive the circumstances that created it…. Individuals preserve an established public opinion in trying to be prudent—in endeavoring, that is, to select their public preferences at least partly on the basis of reputational incentives inferred from the history of public opinion…. When large numbers of people conceal their misgivings about the status quo, individuals may consider their own disenchantments exceptional…. Through preference falsification, they may thus hold in place structures that they could, if only they acted together, easily change.” Kuran observes that this also can lead to inefficient outcomes. “Preference falsification is itself a form of free riding, for it is undertaken to avoid the personal cost of achieving a desirable social outcome. As such, it is another basic source of inefficiency…. Where preference falsification differs from Olsonian free riding is that both its practice and its consequences may remain hidden.”

Public opinion also can, over time, shift actual private beliefs. “By transferring beliefs from the realm of the thinkable to that of the unthinkable, social pressures induce the withdrawal of those beliefs from public discourse. The consequent reconstruction of public discourse distorts private knowledge. In particular, it makes people progressively less conscious of the disadvantages of what is publicly favored and increasingly more conscious of the advantages. As a result, private opinion moves against the publicly unfavored alternatives. Having lessened their public popularity, preference falsification thus ends up also lessening their private popularity…. The status quo, once sustained because people were afraid to challenge it, will thus come to persist because no one understands its flaws or can imagine a better alternative. Preference falsification will have brought intellectual narrowness and ossification.”

Public preferences can shift rapidly once information reaches certain breaking points and perceptions snowball. “Neither private preferences nor the corresponding thresholds are common knowledge. A society can therefore come to the brink of a revolution without anyone realizing this, not even those with the power to unleash it…. [However,] widespread antipathy toward the government is not sufficient to mobilize large numbers for revolutionary action…. If the opposition is minuscule, the expected cost of revolting is immense…. By the same token, a revolution may break out in a society where private preferences, and therefore individual thresholds, tend to be relatively favorable to the government. It is necessary only for additions to the opposition to trigger further defections from the government’s ranks. In other words, the threshold sequence must form a bandwagon that is mobile at the prevailing public opposition…. In reality, a revolutionary bandwagon may help create the discontent that keeps it in motion…. Not only is mass discontent inessential to start a revolution, but the early movers need not be among society’s most disaffected members…. A nineteenth-century socialist is reputed to have exclaimed to a friend handing coins to a beggar: “Don’t delay the revolution!””

However much events have catalysts, social outcomes cannot be mass managed, planned, or preordained. “First, insofar as social outcomes result from interaction among individual actions, collective responses, and preexisting social structures, no person or group will deserve full credit for an unfolding outcome. Observed social outcomes are bound to be unconstructed. Second, no one can reliably imagine all long-term consequences of any given choice. There will be social outcomes that were unintended…. The spread of new ideas is determined partly, if not substantially, by the diverse communications that form ordinary public discourse. Neither these communications nor the consequent development of public discourse can be controlled with precision…. Social evolution is influenced by chance and contingency, in addition, of course, to genuine desires.”

It is important to note that Kuran’s theory of preference falsification is normatively neutral. “One can recognize the role of preference falsification in an ideology’s dissemination without having to pass judgment on the ideology. Conversely, one can praise or criticize an ideology without losing sight of its dependence on preference falsification.”