If he decides to break through this barrier, he will naturally be drawn to tyrants, because they are more likely than ordinary statesmen to cut the Gordian knot of public sloth with some energetic stroke. One may say that the lesson is trivial. Xenophon does not even attempt to defend Socrates against the charge that he led the young to look down with contempt on the political order established in Athens. Lost your password? What we are in the habit of expecting is not having to bother about tyrants. It is a necessary consequence of the modern commitment to intellectual honesty that such appeals must be dismissed. The Xenophon’s Simonides sets out to show Hiero how he can “rule as a virtuous tyrant” (p. 96), and his learned exegete by implication subscribes to this noble enterprise. If Xenophon is a school classic, and if Strauss is on his way to becoming a modern university classic, then the least one can say is that both authors have been fortunate in their publishers. At this point Kojève runs into the difficulty of having to make room for the kind of tyrant who places himself consciously in the service of a revolutionary idea. A philosophy which flinched away from its own insights as being too bleak and comfortless, would hardly be worth having.Explore the scintillating July/August 2020 issue of Commentary. Xenophon Versus Hegel On Tyranny. î On Tyranny Ú Download by Leo Strauss On Tyranny Is Leo Strauss S Classic Reading Of Xenophon S Dialogue, Hiero Or Tyrannicus, In W... Home Leo Strauss and the American Right The Truth about Leo Strauss This edition includes a Contrary to the vulgar prejudice against philosophy as useless, the philosopher is quite competent to tender such advice, for he sees the whole picture (in Hegelian terms, “the truth in its concreteness”), while the statesman—who need not be a tyrant—never sees more than what is immediately relevant to his purpose. Kojève cites Alexander’s relationship to Aristotle, which was basic to the conqueror’s revolutionary aim of transcending the He also drops a tantalizing hint about Hegel, who admired Napoleon, and whose implied defense of revolutionary despotism has had practical consequences in our own day. Leo Strauss (/ s t r aʊ s /; German: [ˈleːo ˈʃtʁaʊs]; September 20, 1899 – October 18, 1973) was a German-American political philosopher and classicist who specialized in classical political philosophy.Born in Germany to Jewish parents, Strauss later emigrated from Germany to the United States. Strauss may not realize it, but his pessimism could become infectious. Strauss is so completely under the spell of the Greeks in general, and Xenophon in particular, that he presents his argument in the form of an eighty-page analysis of Xenophon’s text (a new translation of which was commissioned by Agora Editions, the editors responsible for the book, to enable the reader to follow the finer points of Strauss’s analysis). The This point leads to a consideration of Kojève’s essay, which is by far the most brilliant part of the book, and the element that raises it above the level of mere exegesis.
For him, the human problem—so far as politics is concerned—is fixed eternally in the classical (biblical and Socratic) texts, and the modern attempt to disregard these verities represents a monumental aberration, for which the world will have to pay (unless Reason reasserts itself) by sliding into universal tyranny.
Yet Strauss—while well aware of this fact and deeply alarmed by it—refers to atheism with horror, as though it were some kind of obscene disease caught by infection, instead of being the characteristic attitude of modern man. Thinkers rather than poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Strauss promptly picks up the challenge by reminding him of Stalin. The movement of thought since Machiavelli (he does not mention Vico) is to him a movement away from the Truth.The sharpest reproach Strauss can urge against Kojève (and Hegel) is that of atheism. The present moment is not perhaps a very good one for recalling that successful action can be democratic, and that even Hegelian philosophers can be democrats; but the reservation has nonetheless to be made.While Kojève and Strauss clash at practically every point, their deepest differences relate to what Strauss calls “historicism,” and what Kojève describes as the understanding of history. Free Press. . It would be more accurate to say that it was trivial in former ages, for today such little actions like that of Simonides are not taken seriously because we are in the habit of expecting too much” (p. 201). When Socrates was charged with teaching his pupils to be “tyrannical,” this doubtless was due to the popular misunderstanding of a theoretical thesis as a practical proposal. This is inexact, for Hegel would have recognized that—to cite a topical example—the destruction of Germany as a nation was the price paid by the Germans for allowing Hitler to obtain power.Kojève and Strauss enter into a fascinating dispute over the philosopher’s role in the “city.” The burden of Strauss’s original argument had been that, under a constitutional government or even under a “virtuous tyrant,” the proper role of the philosopher is to attend to the eternal verities which are perceived in contemplation. On Tyranny is Leo Strauss's classic reading of Xenophon's dialogue, Hiero or Tyrannicus, in which the tyrant Hiero and the poet Simonides discuss the advantages and disadvantages of exercising tyranny. Left alone with his untested notions he is not distinguishable from “the lunatic who believes that he is made out of glass, or who identifies himself with God the Father or Napoleon.” In order to test the validity of his thoughts he must leave his study—or his Epicurean “garden”—and venture out into the market place, where he encounters other men, not all of them professional philosophers. Loyalties are essential to every form of government, and the concept of loyalty leads back to philosophy, which is the vision of the historical process as a whole. From the Hegelian viewpoint—which in this matter was simply the Christian viewpoint—the classical world was a kind of intellectual nursery which Christendom had outgrown. Strauss, who thinks in terms of archetypal situations which the classics have described once and for all, denounces the very notion of such an outcome. So far as political understanding goes, there is not much to be got out of Xenophon or any other minor Socratic.