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Lectures on Hegel's Political Philosophy 1 LEO STRAUSS LECTURES ON HEGEL’S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY A course offered in the autumn quarter, 1958 Department of Political Science, The University of Chicago Edited by Paul Franco Paul Franco is professor of Government at Bowdoin College. He is author of Hegel’s Philosophy of Freedom (Yale University Press, 1999) and other works on political philosophy. With assistance from Eliza Little 2 © 1961 by Joseph Cropsey © 2019 Estate of Leo Strauss. All Rights Reserved. 3 Table of Contents Editor’s Introduction i-xiv Note on the Leo Strauss Transcript Project xv-xvi Editorial Headnote xvi-xvii Session 1: Philosophical Background to Hegel: Kant and Spinoza 1-16 Session 2: The Three Types of History 17-32 Session 3: Providence and the End of History 33-40 Session 4: The End of History and the Means of Actualizing It 41-61 Session 5: Morality and History; Objective Freedom; Religion and the State 62-88 Session 6: Prehistory, Empirical History, America, and Africa 89-108 Session 7: China, India, Persia, and Egypt 109-127 Session 8: Egypt Continued and the Transition to Greece 128-144 Session 9: Greece 145-164 Session 10: Rome and the Transition to Christianity 165-185 Session 11: The Middle Ages 186-201 Session 12: The Reformation 202-205 Session 13: Excursus on Logic and History 206-224 Session 14: The French Revolution, Freedom, and Democracy 225-241 i Introduction to the Transcripts of Leo Strauss’s Courses on Hegel’s Philosophy of History, 1958 and 1965 Paul Franco Leo Strauss offered a course on Hegel’s Philosophy of History twice during his time at the University of Chicago, once in the Autumn quarter of 1958, and again in the Winter quarter of 1965. The transcripts of these courses follow. No audio tapes survive for the 1958 course, and therefore the transcript of it is in a somewhat fragmentary condition. The transcript of the 1965 course, for which audio tapes do survive, is relatively complete. In terms of theme and manner of treatment, the two courses are very similar. What differences there are between them arise from the fact that Strauss’s remarks generally take off from the specific student paper that opens each class period and from the specific student questions that are raised during each class period. It is fortunate that we have access to these courses. Hegel is one of the few great philosophers that Strauss did not write about at any length over the course of his career. There are, of course, numerous references to Hegel in Strauss’s published writings, some of them quite intriguing. But more often than not, Hegel is treated as a domino in Strauss’s schematic history of modern political philosophy and of the genesis of historicism. The courses he taught at the University of Chicago reflect a much deeper engagement with Hegel on Strauss’s part, and one that is surprisingly sympathetic to the great nineteenth-century thinker. Before taking up the content of these courses, I would like to briefly survey Strauss’s engagement with Hegel in his published writings.i There are three principal contexts in which Hegel’s name comes up in Strauss’s writings: in connection with his studies of Hobbes in the 1930s; in his debate with Alexandre Kojève in On Tyranny; and in his account of the “three waves” of modern political philosophy. Let me begin with the Hobbes-Hegel connection. During the 1930s, Strauss was deeply engaged in the study of Hobbes’s political philosophy. This is evidenced not only in his 1936 book, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, but also in a number unpublished writings on Hobbes that have been printed in i For accounts of Strauss’s interpretation of Hegel, mainly as mediated by Kojève, see Sara MacDonald and Barry Craig, Recovering Hegel from the Critique of Leo Strauss (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), chap. 1; Robert Pippin, “Being, Time, and Politics: The Strauss-Kojève Debate, History and Theory 32 (1992): 138-61. MacDonald and Craig refer to Strauss’s lectures on Hegel but focus primarily on his published works. In “Kojève’s Hegel, Hegel’s Hegel, and Strauss’s Hegel: A Middle Range Approach to the Debate about Tyranny and Totalitarianism,” Waller Newell brings out the differences between Strauss’s reading of Hegel and Kojève’s; see Philosophy, History, and Tyranny: Reexamining the Debate between Leo Strauss and Alexandre Kojève, ed. Timothy Burns and Bryan-Paul Frost (Albany: SUNY Press, 2016), 237-44. ii Strauss’s Gesammelte Schriften and recently translated into English.ii As is well known, Strauss’s interest in Hobbes stemmed from a desire to investigate the roots of modern political philosophy with a view to critiquing it and reopening the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns.iii As part of this investigation, Strauss seems to have envisaged writing a comparative study of Hobbes and Hegel.iv This intention received expression in a footnote in Strauss’s Hobbes book, where he wrote: “M. Alexandre Kojevnikoff and the writer intend to undertake a detailed investigation of the connexion between Hobbes and Hegel.”v The context of this footnote is a comparison between Hobbes’s principle of the fear of violent death and Hegel’s account of the origin of self-consciousness in the master-slave dialectic. For Strauss, the fear of violent death in Hobbes plays the same foundational role with respect to modern moral and political philosophy that radical doubt in Descartes plays with respect to modern metaphysics. Like radical doubt, the fear of violent death springs from distrust of nature rather than grateful acceptance of it, and it leads to an effort to actively control nature rather than to mere contemplation of it. According to Strauss, Hegel agrees with Hobbes on this foundational point when he locates the origin of self-consciousness in the slave’s fear of violent death in his life-and-death struggle with the master. For both Hobbes and Hegel, bourgeois morality is ultimately grounded in the vanity-liberating fear of violent death.vi The other connection Strauss draws between Hegel and Hobbes relates to the latter’s turn to history in his translation of Thucydides. This turn to history, Strauss claims, was motivated by Hobbes’s interest in the application of moral precepts. Reason by itself is incapable of getting human beings to obey moral norms; historical examples are needed to make obedience easier. This same conviction of the impotence of reason and rejection of the morality of obedience ultimately underpin Hegel’s philosophy of history, according to Strauss. From Hobbes to Hegel, the problem of applying moral norms and guaranteeing the actualization of the best regime becomes the focus of modern political philosophy.vii As it turned out, Strauss and Kojève never wrote their projected comparative study of Hobbes and Hegel.viii They did, however, collaborate almost two decades after the ii See Leo Strauss, Hobbes’s Critique of Religion and Related Writings, trans. and ed. Gabriel Bartlett and Svetozar Minkov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). iii See the final paragraph of Strauss’s “Comments on Schmitt’s Der Begriff des Politischen,” in Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, trans. E. M. Sinclair (New York: Schocken Books, 1965). See also The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis, trans. E. M. Sinclair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), Preface and Introduction. iv See Heinrich Meier’s Introduction to Hobbes’s Critique of Religion, 5; also Strauss’s December 1933 letters to Gerhard Krüger, Jacob Klein, Karl Löwith, and Gershom Scholem, cited on 5n15. v Strauss, Political Philosophy of Hobbes, 58n1. vi Strauss, Political Philosophy of Hobbes, 56-58, 122-23. See also Strauss’s letter to Hans-Georg Gadamer and Gerhard Krüger of 12 May 1935, in Hobbes’s Critique of Religion, 159-63. vii Strauss, Political Philosophy of Hobbes, 93-94, 104-7, 130, 150-52. viii Kojève did write a letter to Strauss on 2 November 1936 in which he thanked Strauss for his Hobbes book and offered some of his own views on the Hobbes-Hegel relationship; reprinted in iii publication of The Political Philosophy of Hobbes on a book that allowed Strauss to engage more fully with Hegel’s philosophy, or at least Kojève’s idiosyncratic version of it. On Tyranny (1954) began life as a commentary by Strauss on Xenophon’s short dialogue Hiero. Strauss used this dialogue to show how Xenophon employed a socially responsible rhetoric that allowed him to reveal certain truths to a small minority of philosophers while hiding them from the majority of ordinary citizens. This rhetoric, he said, was “based on the premise that there is a disproportion between the intransigent quest for truth and the requirements of society.”ix This premise was also bound up with the purpose of the dialogue: to contrast two different ways of life, the political life and the philosophical life, and to show the superiority of the latter by pointing to the self- sufficiency of the wise man versus the political ruler’s need for love.x It is precisely this radical disjunction of philosophy and politics, theory and practice, that Kojève criticizes in his response to Strauss. The philosopher, he argues, plays a crucial role in positively influencing political reality and in bringing about the “universal and homogeneous state” that constitutes the Hegelian end or goal of history. Kojève rejects what he sees as Strauss’s “Epicurean” idea of the philosophical life as isolated from society and devoted to the quest for purely theoretical truth. Such an idea rests on a “theistic” conception of Being as immutable and eternally identical to itself.
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