Leo Strauss, Education, and Political Thought by Peters Michael A. Drury Shadia B. Zuckert Michael Zuckert Catherine H. Meier Heinrich York J. G. Fennell Jon McDonough Tim Robertson Neil G. Simpson Timothy L. York J.G

Author:Peters, Michael A., Drury, Shadia B., Zuckert, Michael, Zuckert, Catherine H., Meier, Heinrich, York, J. G., Fennell, Jon, McDonough, Tim, Robertson, Neil G., Simpson, Timothy L., York, J.G
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781611470550
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson
Published: 2014-07-25T16:00:00+00:00

PART II

It may seem odd that Strauss's chief extended discussion of the differences between Plato and Aristotle should occur around the disciplinary topic propounded in The City and Man. It may not seem less odd, but it appears more premeditated, if we recall that, in the same year that Strauss delivered the lectures that served as the basis for The City and Man, he published his “Epilogue” to Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics. A prominent part of his concluding essay was, as we have seen, the call for a return to the “old political science” from the new “scientific” political science: “it is best to contrast the new political science directly with the ‘original’ of the old, that is, with Aristotelian political science” (Liberalism Ancient and Modern [LAM] 205). In this context Strauss outlines five elements of Aristotelian political science. That is, he turns here to Aristotle also in the context of discussing the disciplinary character of political science, and he takes for granted what is the thematic question of the Aristotle chapter: that his is the “original” political science.

Strauss's “Epilogue” is an attempt to encourage his fellow political scientists to withdraw their obeisance or deference to the new science, which takes its bearings from the philosophical doctrines of logical positivism and empiricism. He attempts to wean them away from the new science by both laying out an explicit alternative to it—the aforementioned Aristotelian political science—and by mounting a critique of the presuppositions of the new science. Strauss had on many previous occasions criticized the distinction between facts and values, which is such a large part of the foundation of the new political science. In this context, he passes over this theme quickly by collapsing it into the critique of the empiricist commitments of the new political science. This latter theme comes to sight as more fundamental, both because it provides the deeper ground behind the fact–value distinction, and because it brings to light the chief ground of attraction, “the sympathetic chord,” that accounts for the strength of the new political science. That attraction proceeds from the ordinary political scientist's intuition that political science must be an empirical discipline. Although as a student (mainly) of old texts, it might seem that Strauss would wish to resist this empirical orientation, but in fact he embraces it wholeheartedly. “This is a demand of common sense;” and one that the old political science he commends did in fact meet (LAM, 210). Strauss parts ways with the new political science and its philosophical projectors, not over the need for an empirical science, but over how that need is understood: the new scientists are empiricists, not merely empirical.

The core differences between empirical inquiry and empiricism, as Strauss presents it, is that empirical inquiry as such—that is, the reliance on experience for knowledge of the political world—retains (willy-nilly) a commitment to the same common sense that underlies the demand for empirical inquiry in the first place. Although more than a few critics have challenged