Fall 2016 Volume 43 Issue 1

1 Tributes to Hilail Gildin: Timothy W. Burns, Marco Andreacchio, Javier Berzal de Dios, Ann Hartle, David Lewis Schaefer & John F. Wilson

Articles: 29 Giorgi Areshidze Does Toleration Require Religious Skepticism? An Examination of Locke’s Letters on Toleration and Essay concerning Human Understanding

57 Robert P. Kraynak Nietzsche, Tocqueville, and Maritain: On the Secularization of Religion as the Source of Modern Democracy

91 Benjamin Lorch Maimonides on Prophecy and the Moral Law 111 Christopher Scott McClure Sculpting Modernity: Machiavelli and Michelangelo’s David Book Reviews: 125 Allan Arkush The Love of God: Divine Gift, Human Gratitude, and Mutual Faithfulness in Judaism by Jon D. Levenson

129 D. N. Byrne The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: From the Sublime and Beautiful to American Independence by David Bromwich

133 Christopher Colmo Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi, and the Risk of Democracy by Aishwary Kumar

139 Alexander Duff Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy: On Original Forgetting by Richard L. Velkley

145 David Foster Two Treatises of Government by John Locke, edited, with an introduction and notes, by Lee Ward

153 Martha Rice Martini Thomas More: Why Patron of Statesmen?, edited by Travis Curtright 159 Alexander Orwin Leo Strauss and the Recovery of Medieval Political Philosophy by Joshua Parens

163 Rene Paddags Tocqueville and the Frontiers of Democracy, edited by Ewa Atanassow and Richard Boyd

169 Rene Paddags The Free Animal: Rousseau on Free Will and Human Nature by Lee MacLean

175 Jonathan W. Pidluzny Terrorism Unjustified: The Use and Misuse of Political Violence by Vicente Medina

183 Ahmed Ali Siddiqi Alfarabi: The Political Writings, Volume II, edited by Charles E. Butterworth 189 Vickie B. Sullivan Machiavelli’s Legacy: “The Prince” after Five Hundred Years, edited by Timothy Fuller

©2016 Interpretation, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of the contents may be reproduced in any form without written permission of the publisher. ISSN 0020-9635 Editor-in-Chief Timothy W. Burns, Baylor University General Editors Charles E. Butterworth • Timothy W. Burns General Editors (Late) Howard B. White (d. 1974) • Robert Horwitz (d. 1987) Seth G. Benardete (d. 2001) • Leonard Grey (d. 2009) • Hilail Gildin (d. 2015) Consulting Editors Christopher Bruell • David Lowenthal • Harvey C. Mansfield • Thomas L. Pangle • Ellis Sandoz • Kenneth W. Thompson Consulting Editors (Late) Leo Strauss (d. 1973) • Arnaldo Momigliano (d. 1987) • Michael Oakeshott (d. 1990) • John Hallowell (d. 1992) • Ernest L. Fortin (d. 2002) • Muhsin Mahdi (d. 2007) • Joseph Cropsey (d. 2012) • Harry V. Jaffa (d. 2015) International Editors Terence E. Marshall • Heinrich Meier Editors Peter Ahrensdorf • Wayne Ambler • Marco Andreacchio • Maurice Auerbach • Robert Bartlett • Fred Baumann • Eric Buzzetti • Susan Collins • Patrick Coby • Erik Dempsey • Elizabeth C’de Baca Eastman • Edward J. Erler • Maureen Feder-Marcus • Robert Goldberg • L. Joseph Hebert • Pamela K. Jensen • Hannes Kerber • Mark J. Lutz • Daniel Ian Mark • Ken Masugi • Carol L. McNamara • Will Morrisey • Amy Nendza • Charles T. Rubin • Leslie G. Rubin • Thomas Schneider • Susan Meld Shell • Geoffrey T. Sigalet • Nicholas Starr • Devin Stauffer • Bradford P. Wilson • Cameron Wybrow • Martin D. Yaffe • Catherine H. Zuckert • Michael P. Zuckert Copy Editor Les Harris Designer Sarah Teutschel Inquiries Interpretation, A Journal of Political Philosophy Department of Political Science Baylor University 1 Bear Place, 97276 Waco, TX 76798 email [email protected] Book Review: Leo Strauss and the Recovery of Medieval Political Philosophy 159

Joshua Parens, Leo Strauss and the Recovery of Medieval Political Philosophy. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2015, xii + 191 pp., $75.00.

Alexander Orwin Harvard University [email protected]

Joshua Parens’s Leo Strauss and the Recovery of Medieval Political Philoso- phy inaugurates the promising series Rochester Studies in Medieval Political Thought. Ably introduced in a foreword by Douglas Kries, the series intends to increase the exposure of medieval political thought through “the publi- cation of worthy manuscripts, collections of articles, and translations and commentaries that treat medieval political thinking in all its remarkable variations” (xii). As Parens confirms in his acknowledgments, half of the twelve chapters have already appeared elsewhere, dispersed among a variety of separate collections published between 2010 and 2014. The other chapters seem to have been composed especially for this volume. Weaving old and new material together poses a considerable challenge, but Parens has lent the book some cohesion by dividing it into three main sections. The first focuses mainly on Alfarabi and Maimonides, while the second and third gradually pivot toward Leo Strauss’s path-breaking interpretations of them. Parens’s basic ideas, aptly expressed in the title, continue a line of thought that should already be somewhat familiar to readers of his previous books. They could be summarized as follows: Leo Strauss recovered not only medieval political philosophy, but political philosophy as such, by reading Alfarabi and Maimonides over a period stretching from the late 1920s through the early 1950s. Strauss came to identify political philosophy as “first philosophy” on the grounds that whatever “metaphysical” knowledge of the whole we

may possess can come only from knowledge of the parts, which is acquired by studying human things (5–6, 35–36, 118, 135, 147). This thesis appears to be based primarily on the introduction to Persecution and the Art of Writing, pp. 38–40 of What Is Political Philosophy?, and pp. 19–21 of City and Man, but to prove it Parens also brings to bear a large assortment of material from the original works of Alfarabi and Maimonides. His intent is to show that the political philosophy recovered by Strauss did in fact exist in these authors, from which it follows that the common religious and Neoplatonic interpretations of them are incorrect. Parens’s detailed interpretation of Strauss constitutes the strongest part of his book. The highlight may be his impressive, section-by-section com- mentary on Strauss’s mature essay on Maimonides (95–109), the culmination of an account of the development of Strauss’s thought. Parens’s treatment of Persecution and the Art of Writing, in which he shows how Strauss dis- plays a subtlety of thought that defies the simple, binary distinction between “Jew and philosopher,” is also highly recommended (62–63, cf. 49–51). His reading of Strauss is nonetheless somewhat selective. He chooses not to com- ment on the later essays “How Fārābī Read Plato’s Laws” (see 96) and “How to Begin to Study the Guide for the Perplexed.” This omission may follow from the assumption that the development of Strauss’s thought in the direc- tion of political philosophy was already complete at that point, but it is not explicitly justified. Parens repeatedly dismisses “Fārābī’s Plato,” dating from the same period as most of the essays in Persecution, as representative of Strauss’s early, insufficiently political understanding of philosophy, but does not assess its arguments in any detail (108, 123–24). Parens might believe that Strauss’s later reworking of the same material in Persecution and the Art of Writing renders the earlier essay superfluous (46), but if so a further explanation would be helpful. Parens’s interpretations of Alfarabi and Maimonides are often illuminat- ing, but they appear subordinate to his interpretation of Strauss, in a way that limits their scope. In the case of Alfarabi, this tendency is reflected in Parens’s interpretation of the Political Regime. Parens draws our attention to a viper that disrupts the hierarchy of the cosmos by devouring animals that ought to be higher than it, and weeds that grow naturally in the virtuous city, tarnishing the paradise on earth. He observes that some of the weeds might be potential philosophers, implying that the philosopher may never feel fully comfortable in any city on earth (31–32). Parens admits that “we could work through other interesting details of Alfarabi’s account of the weeds,” but argues that this would not serve his primary intention of proving that Book Review: Leo Strauss and the Recovery of Medieval Political Philosophy 161

Alfarabi was not a Neoplatonist. I suspect that Parens might have cut off an intriguing discussion too soon. He could have discussed, for example, what the large variety of weeds, philosophic and otherwise, entails for the virtuous city, or what the images of serpent and garden might mean in the context of well-known monotheistic traditions. The same could be said of many of his other interpretations of Alfarabi, such as his account of how dialectic and rhetoric replace kalām in the Book of Religion (72–73), or how political science occurs in two forms in the Enumeration of the Sciences, Book of Religion, and Attainment of Happiness (115–17). These are all very solid observations, which help confirm the claim of Strauss and his students that Alfarabi was a political philosopher. Since Muhsin Mahdi, Miriam Galston, Charles But- terworth, and Parens himself have already made similar points, it is unclear whether they mean to break any new ground. Parens’s work on Maimonides focuses on the very same themes treated in his interpretation of Alfarabi. It contains some fine discussions of Mai- monides’s view of kalām (42–43, 120–21) and unsettled account of matter, evil, and the cosmic order (46–49). Although I am less qualified to assess the originality of this discussion, here too Parens declines to develop some of his most intriguing observations. He remarks that “repeatedly, he [Maimonides] insists on Moses’s superiority to all other prophets, despite the odd fact that, according to Maimonides’ own account, Moses is somehow lacking in imagination” (133). Rather than discuss the puzzling contradiction between this claim and the well-known Maimonidean view that prophecy depends on imagination, Parens proceeds by “leaving aside the oddities” of this account while assuring us that it confirms Maimonides’s debt to Alfarabi. Similarly, he admits to “leaving aside the problematic, if elaborate, arguments for creation” and hurrying to find indications that “the depth of the Guide is political science and philosophy” (121). Carefully reviewing the arguments for prophecy and creation while explaining their problematic character might have made his case stronger. Parens arrives at some general conclusions about Alfarabi’s and Mai- monides’s political thought. He makes a useful distinction between both Alfarabi and Maimonides, who favor monarchy, and Abravanel, who pre- ferred, at least in theory, the rule of judges and priests (92–93). Monarchy, according to Parens, “squares with [Alfarabi’s and Maimonides’s] concep- tion of Moses and prophets more generally as philosopher kings” (93). But neither Moses, Muhammad, nor the rulers of the Republic would have had much in common with the sultans who governed medieval Islamic societies. Do Alfarabi and Maimonides think that the medieval sultanate offers a good 162 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 43 / Issue 1

chance of preserving philosophy in their day and age, and if so, why? What does their acquiescence in monarchy mean in the context of the Muslims, who sought to rule the world (53), and Jews, who sought merely not to be ruled too harshly? While neither Alfarabi nor Maimonides appears to have favored or expected political reform, they did attempt to introduce Neoplatonic doctrines into their respective religions. Parens argues quite persuasively that they may not have believed in the metaphysical truth of these doctrines (31–33, 132–33), but this raises an additional question: why did they think that promoting such doctrines, over and above traditional Muslim and Jewish theology, would have a beneficial effect? Although Parens does not fully answer these questions, this much is clear from his account: just as Strauss sought to recover political philosophy in order to counter the effects of historicism, neo-Hegelianism, and late modern metaphysics (57–59, 109), Alfarabi and Maimonides sought to recover political philosophy in order to counter the effects of monotheism and reduce its tendency to provoke wars over religious opinions (105, 108–9). Perhaps the dissemination of new theological doctrines along with the tacit support of monarchic rulers was intended to serve this end, while assuring the philosophers a place in court. Parens also discusses several other philosophers, such as Aquinas, Spi- noza, and Kant. They serve mainly as foils for Alfarabi, Maimonides, and Strauss. Aquinas did not understand philosophic esotericism (58), and viewed philosophy as a handmaiden to theology (75). Spinoza’s emphasis on Euclid and other fully intelligible writings paved the way for the eclipse of esotericism, so that by the time of Kant the ancient technique was already beginning to be forgotten (56–57, 65). Parens’s comments on Rosenthal, Wal- zer, Gutmann, and other pioneers in the scholarly field of Jewish and Islamic philosophy (17, 20, 39) are generally dismissive: they all failed to understand philosophic esotericism and therefore the difference between scholasticism and medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophy. Yet as Parens acknowledges in a footnote, Strauss himself appears to have maintained decent relations with these scholars (155n3). Finally, Parens includes an appendix whose main sub- ject is the critique of Shlomo Pines (137–47), with whom Strauss worked so profitably on the translation of the Guide. Parens blames Pines’s assimilation of Maimonides into Kant for setting back research in the field. Parens’s book is a useful, well-researched compendium of arguments show- ing that Alfarabi and Maimonides are political philosophers, and elucidating how Strauss rediscovered them to be such. Parens delivers his main message with considerable cogency. There are a few instances in which his impatience to return to the main theme precludes a broader exploration of the issues that he so effectively raises.