Theoria

Apropos:

I believe that in Furet’s argument [the book in question is, in essence, an engagement with Furet's book on communism] I recognize the trace of a current of thought for which Leo Strauss’s work has been a source (or at least Strauss belongs to the current). This philosopher, who contributed so much to the restoration of ancient political philosophy, saw in “the crisis of our time” an ultimate consequence of the project that, outlined before the eighteenth century, took complete shape in the era of the rise of liberalism or of what he also called original democracy. The modern project, as he put it, involved a rupture with the principles of classical philosophy and coincided with (if it did not derive from) the birth of a representation of nature that made nature the object of human domination. Thus science, which for antiquity required the ideal of a contemplative life, henceforth demanded the ideal of an active life. Without overstating the case, one might say that science opened the reign of constructivism and voluntarism. in the register of political thought, the change consisted in abandoning both the idea of a political city whose ends were written into the order of the cosmos and the ideas of citizens who relationships were regulated according to community exigencies. Those notions of finality, hierarchy, and natural order (nature meaning that which is not the product of human will) were all eliminated when two conceptions arose simultaneously: of an entirely egalitarian society and of an agglomerate of individuals who each had at his [sic] disposal the same knowledge and rights. In such a society, the cohesion of the ensemble was supposed to result in the majority’s delegation of public authority to a small number of representatives accountable to those who elected them. As supposedly autonomous individuals were equal under the law, no matter their other virtues and vices and nothing permitting the restraint of their civic spirit (their education and mores escaping the public authority’s control), it turned out that political leaders put in place by suffrage had henceforth only to answer to people without obligations. Consequently, their own responsibility became fictive. Following this argument, one might believe that the modern project, founded on the unrestricted equality and freedom of its citizens, testified only to an erroneous conception of political society. However, since this conception molded and fashioned the reality of human relationships, one can ask whether political society itself was not in the process of dissolution. It tended, indeed, to lose the meaning of its cohesion and limits, together with the meaning of its ends, and thus to dissolve into the heart an undifferentiated universe.

Strauss concluded not only that the distinction in our era between conservatives and liberals hid a common adherence to the modern project, but that “at first glance liberalism seems to agree with Communism as regards the ultimate goal, while it radically disagrees with it as regards the way to the goal. The goal may be said to be the universal and classless society, or to use the correction proposed by Kojeve, the universal and homogeneous state of which every adult human being is a full member.” This theme was clearly formulated in “Political Philosophy and the Crisis of Our Time” [1964], where Strauss argued that the conservatism of our age merged with what was at the origin of liberalism. “One can go further,” Strauss noted, “and say that much of what goes now by the name of conservatism has in the last analysis a common root with present-day liberalism, and even with Communism.”

From Claude Lefort’s Complications, pages 70-1.