6

On Strauss on Rousseau

Victor Gourevitch

Im Sinn der Philosophie ist es durchaus Pflicht, die falschen Ansichten zu

missbilligen, zu verwerfen. Freilich muss man auch den Falschen, verwerflichen
Ansichten gerecht werden.
–Strauss, GS 2: 409

Strauss discussed Rousseau from first to last, and he devoted two impor-
tant and influential studies to him in close succession: “On the Intention of
Rousseau,”1 and the first part of the concluding section of Natural Right and
History, entitled “The Crisis of Modern Natural Right.”2 Both studies con-
sider the whole of Rousseau’s thought. “The Intention” does so primarily in

1
The republication of this article from this volume is cited hereafter as “Intention.” Strauss’s
other works are cited as follows: AAPL: The Argument and Action of Plato’s Laws (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1975); CM: The City and Man (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964);
GS: Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Heinrich Meier (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1996); HPP: History of
Political Philosophy, ed. Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1963); IPP:
Introduction to Political Philosophy, ed. Hilail Gildin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1989); JPCM: Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1997); LAM: Liberalism, Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic Books, 1968);
NRH: Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953); OPS: On Plato’s
Symposium, ed. Seth Benardete (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); OT: On Tyranny,
ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael Roth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); PAW:
Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1952); PPH: The Political Philosophy
of Hobbes, trans. Elsa M. Sinclair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952); RCPR: Rebirth
of Classical Political Rationalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); SCR: Spinoza’s
Critique of Religion, trans. Elsa M. Sinclair (New York: Schocken Books, 1965); SPPP: Studies
in Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); TM: Thoughts on
Machiavelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); WIPP: What is Political Philosophy?
(Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1959); XSD: Xenophon’s Socratic Discourse (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1972).
2
F. Béland’s “Update” of the annotations, Interpretation (Spring 2008) 36:2, 183–93, is helpful.

147
148 Victor Gourevitch

the light of the First Discourse; the NRH section does so primarily in the light
of the Second Discourse.3 Both studies play a pivotal role in Strauss’s account
of modern political philosophy: Rousseau’s thought is where, Strauss argues,
the crisis of modern political philosophy became a crisis of philosophy as
such (“Intention,” 143f.; NRH 252, 273f.; 34). Both studies are what, in a
different context, Strauss calls an “explanation,” an “attempt to ascertain the
implications of . . . [an author’s] statements of which he was unaware”(PAW
143). They seek to understand their author better than he understood himself.
Still, “The Intention” ends by speaking of Rousseau’s “amazingly lucid vision”
(“Intention,” 146).
Rousseau felt “that the modern venture was a radical error” (NRH 252). He
therefore set out to restore the classical understanding of philosophy and the
philosopher, as well as the classical philosophical understanding of the polis.
He did so in the name of “two classical ideas, the city and virtue, on the one
hand, and nature, on the other” (NRH 253, 261f.). He would thus seem to
have set out to do very precisely what Strauss himself seems to have set out
to do (NRH 318). However, on Strauss’s telling, the effect of his teaching was
the very opposite of what he had intended: it accelerated the advance of the
modernity that he had sought to reverse.
Strauss compares his history of philosophy to Aristotle’s history of philoso-
phy in the First Book of the Metaphysics (NRH 33, 28n19). It is a taxonomy
in the guise of history. It seeks to lay bare the “few” permanent problems, and
to show the various philosophical teachings as so many attempts to artic-
ulate one or another of the “few” possible resolutions of these permanent
problems. The story he tells is, as Aristotle says about poetry in contrast to
history, philosophic: more concerned with what is likely because probable or
necessary than with what did happen; more concerned with universals than
with particulars; with how far Rousseau’s thought illustrates and develops
the basic premises of modernity as Strauss sees these premises than with what
Rousseau may have thought or said (Poetics 1451a36–1451b11). His account
of modern political philosophy proceeds as inexorably as does Hegel’s his-
tory, except that on his telling the cunning of unreason replaces the cunning
of reason. He makes it appear all the more inevitable by telling it in the form
of a flashback: he announces from the very first that its outcome is modern
nihilism (NRH 18, 48).
On one occasion Strauss remarks that he finds particularly congenial a for-
mula which Löwith had used to describe Nietzsche’s project: “To recapitulate
the Ancients at the peak of Modernity” (06/23/35, GS 3: 648). The formula

3
I am aware of two discussions of the differences between these studies: Hilail Gildin, “A Note on
Leo Strauss’s Interpretation of Rousseau,” Anastaplo Festschrift (Athens: Ohio University Press,
1992), 311–17; Heinrich Meier, Die Denkbewegung von Leo Strauss (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1996),
34–41; translated in Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), 53–73.
On Strauss on Rousseau 149

implies major concessions to the modernity that his writings appear intended
to refute root and branch.4

Strauss orients his thinking by what he calls the “natural understanding,” the
first-for-us commonsense understanding of “social reality as we know it in actual
life, and the world as men have always known it since there have been civil
societies” (NRH 78–80, 123f., 276). It corresponds to Plato’s cave. Its medium
is opinion, the opinions and speeches (logoi) that enshrine intimations – “divi-
nations” – of “the nature of things” and as it were “solicit” our opinions about
them (NRH 100f., 123–5; 270). Insofar as they do, we could “recollect” them.
Strauss recognizes that to claim that what we say “divines” by “a natural or
unconscious process” the truths which “as it were” “solicit” these divinations,
is to argue in a circle. There may be no escaping it: “the only way of overcom-
ing the naïveté of the man from Missouri is to admit in the first place that that
naïveté cannot be avoided in any way or that there is no possible human thought
which is not in the last analysis dependent on the legitimacy of that naïveté and
the awareness or the knowledge going with it” (LAM 213, 219).
That is the perspective Rousseau adopts in the First Discourse and from
which he argues that enlightenment – assigning an ever larger role to the arts
and sciences in public life – corrupts both public life or morals (mœurs) and the
arts and sciences. Strauss attends primarily to Rousseau’s reflections about the
“sciences,” theoretical inquiry or philosophy. He reads them as confirming the
basic truth, that there is a “natural antagonism between science and society, or
between science and virtue,” insofar as virtue is political virtue (“Intention,”
140f., 129n26, 136n51, 137f., 141; NRH 261f., 287f.; OT 205f.). On the
face of it, the Discourse – and, indeed, much of Rousseau’s political writing –
may seek to resolve this conflict by subordinating science to society, theoreti-
cal to practical reason or morality. Strauss rejects this Kantian reading of the
Discourse. Its intention is to defend the primacy of “the classical idea of phi-
losophy” (“Intention,” 128–30; NRH 255, 261f.). The privileged form of “the
classical idea of philosophy” is Socratic wisdom: knowledge of ignorance, an
involuntary and hence, Strauss holds, an innocent form of skepticism (NRH
72, 125f., 262; “Intention,” 136; First Discourse, 3: 13f.). Its primary public
task is to compose the natural antagonism between science and society by hav-
ing the few who pursue theoretical knowledge protect their pursuit of it against
suspicion and persecution by society at the same time as they protect society
against the questions about its foundations that inevitably arise in the pursuit
of theoretical knowledge. “Utility and truth are two entirely different things”

4
Hermann Cohen commits “. . .the typical mistake of the conservative which consists in conceal-
ing the fact that the continuous and changing tradition which he cherishes so greatly would
never have come into being through conservatism, or without discontinuities, revolutions and
sacrileges committed at the beginning of the cherished tradition and at least silently repeated in
its course” (SCR 27,25=LAM 253,250=JPCM 169,165; see also note 8 to this essay).
150 Victor Gourevitch

(NRH 6; 258f.). Rousseau agrees. His rule is to speak the truth when and wher-
ever it is useful (“Intention,” 134–36; Letter to Voltaire, OC 4: 1074; Letter to
Beaumont, OC 4: 967; Rêveries, OC 1: 1026f.). It is in the spirit of this rule
to leave unsaid what to do about truths that are not useful, let alone about
truths that are harmful, “assuming that there are such truths” (“Intention,”
134; NRH 289). However, Strauss disagrees with the form in which he has
Rousseau implement this rule. The reader is sometimes left to wonder whether
he criticizes Rousseau for propounding a false teaching or for propounding a
true teaching impolitically (“Intention,” 143f., NRH 275f., 287f.).
The thesis of Strauss’s interpretation of the Second Discourse is that with it
Rousseau abandons “social reality as we know it in actual life, and the world as
men have always known it since there have been civil societies,” and embraces
instead “modern natural science” (“Intention,” 140, 148f.; NRH 263, 268,
277). Strauss’s “modern natural science” (or “system philosophy”: to Voegelin
December 10, 1950) is the Moderns’ project for a science that is presuppo-
sitionless, “metaphysically neutral” in “the secular conflict between material-
ism and anti-materialism” or between “Epicureanism” and “Platonism” (NRH
172, 173f.).5 Strauss fully grants the difficulty at issue between “Platonism”
and “Epicureanism,” but he categorically rejects the possibility of a presup-
positionless middle ground between them: intelligibility requires formal and/
or final causes; but teleological physics – or biology – is not available (NRH
172; cf. XSD 149, OT 279), any more than is a satisfactory account of the
relations between the goods of the parts and their possible order as a whole.
The recognition that they are not available is independent of the victory of
modern science (Plato, Phaedo 96E5–99C9; Strauss, XSD 24, 149). As regards
“Epicureanism,” Strauss further charges that it is not properly mindful of its
political context. “Political philosophy is the first philosophy” (CM 20, 240f.)
because the garden of Epicurus – like Plato’s Isle of the Blessed – is only meta-
phorically outside the city. Access to them is necessarily mediated by reflections
on first-for-us opinion (NRH 123–5, 262, 259, 263). Still, it sometimes looks
as if the distinction Strauss draws between “Platonism” and “Epicureanism”
corresponded to the distinction between politic philosophy and philosophy
unqualified. He introduces his discussion of the Second Discourse with a brief
contrast between Rousseau’s account of human beginnings and the account
of human beginnings in Lucretius’s poem. He never so much as suggests that
Lucretius’s account is wrong. All he says is that it is not designed or suited to
provide guidance for the right political order (NRH 112f., 188f.; LAM 131).
Platonism and Epicureanism, for all their differences about the nature of
things and about the prospects for the right political order, are at one in distin-
guishing between theory and practice (NRH 110, 112, 113, 177n11). Strauss

5
“Prior to the victory of the new physics, there was not the science of physics simply: there were
Aristotelian physics, Platonic physics, Epicurean physics, Stoic physics; to speak colloquially,
there was no metaphysically neutral physics” (LAM 205).
On Strauss on Rousseau 151

charges that “modern natural science” collapses this distinction on the premise
that all we can and need know is what we make (NRH 177n11, 170, 280f.).
If we can know only what we make, we can know only if we make that out of
which we make what we make, and hence also ourselves, if we are causae sui
(NRH 173, 194, 201, 249f.; 272n39; JPCM 103 = RCPR 244f.). Some readers
have taken Strauss to characterize the Discourse as an exercise in “modern nat-
ural science” because it cites Buffon and travelers’ reports about orangutans,
pongos, and savages in remote corners of the globe. He explicitly rejects this
reading (NRH 268f.). When he speaks of the Second Discourse as an exercise
in “modern natural science,” he means that it explores the proposition that
“we” make ourselves; and hence that in the final analysis the differentia of
man is freedom or “creativity” (NRH 270, 271, 273, 274, 201, 280f.; WIPP
176n, 182).
Rousseau’s Second Discourse is guided by the Dijon Academy’s question
about how inequality – political rule – may have arisen – its “origin” – and
how it may be justified – its “foundations”: why do or would the naturally or
“physically” superior – the stronger and/or more virtuous and/or more wise –
consent to be ruled by the naturally or physically weaker and/or less virtuous
and/or less wise? Its premise is, then, that by nature men are unequal, and that
by right the strong and/or virtuous and/or wise should rule: strict distributive
justice (Ineq. OC 3: 131f., 116f., 193f., 222f.; SC 3.5, OC 3: 407).
Strauss’s Rousseau “takes it for granted” (NRH 266) that the quest for the
origin and foundations of political rule or natural right requires inquiries into
what, ever since Hobbes, has come to be referred to as the state of nature, “the
state of men without civill society” (De Cive, Preface, 34) or acknowledged
common superior, the state of men who are judges in their own case (NRH 84;
Judges 21: 25). He charges that Hobbes, like all of his predecessors, had viewed
that state in the light of the civil state (Ineq. OC 3: 132, NRH 183f., 267,
275f.). All of them had proceeded on the basis of what Strauss calls “social
reality as we know it in actual life, and the world as men have always known
it since there have been civil societies”: post hoc ergo propter hoc, “preposter-
ously” (Ineq. OC 3: 153f.). Rousseau tries to avoid doing so in his attempt to
disentangle “what is original from what is artificial in man’s present nature,
and to know accurately a state which no longer exists, which perhaps did not
ever exist, which probably will not ever exist, and about which it is neverthe-
less necessary to have exact Notions in order accurately to judge of our present
state” (Ineq. OC 3: 123). Strauss clearly remembered Rousseau’s formulation
when he said that the classics’ best regime “was perhaps never actual; there
is no reason to assume that it is actual at present; and it may never become
actual. It is of its essence to exist in speech as distinguished from deed” (NRH
139; CM 44).
Sometimes Rousseau calls this state of man without – and conceivably prior
to – artifice and convention, the “pure state of nature” (Ineq. OC 3: 132, 147,
170, 216f.); at other times he calls it man’s “primitive state” (Ineq. OC 3: 122,
152 Victor Gourevitch

123, 142, 147, 151, 160, 170, 208, 217, 219). Strauss consistently calls it “the
primitive state of nature” (once “the (original) state of nature” NRH 285), “a
state which completely lacks all human traits” (NRH 293), and man in this
state “subhuman,” a “stupid animal” (NRH 271, 273, 274, 292). Rousseau
devotes much of the first of the two Parts of the Discourse to his conjectures
about this state. It is the Part to which Strauss devotes most of his attention.
It is central to his account that in Rousseau’s view this state is “fact,” and
that Rousseau claims to have proved that it is fact (NRH 267n32, 275). He
dismisses Rousseau’s saying that it is conjectural as an accommodation to the
biblical account (NRH 267n32; Ineq. OC 3: 132; WIPP 190f.). Yet it would
seem that a state of man without artifice or convention can only be an object
of thought; as soul without body or color without shape can only be objects of
thought or, as Strauss puts it, “only in speech” (NRH 139, 146). The state of
man “in fact” may always, everywhere, necessarily, be a mixture of the natural
and the artificial or conventional, and it may be “natural” that this be so.
Men in the conjectural state without society, language, reason, morality, in
short without art or convention, would have few, primarily physical, needs that
could be satisfied easily and by oneself alone – food, rest, shelter – and few,
sluggish, passions (Ineq. OC 3: 134f., 143; NRH 129, CM 96, 111); their pow-
ers would be proportioned to their needs; hence they would not be irrevers-
ibly dependent on one another materially or morally; hence “free”; and, since
their natural inequalities could make no difference among beings that are not
dependent on one another, “equal.” They would be equal because free. Being
self-contained and self-sufficient, no impulsions would move them to abandon
their state or to alter it. They could therefore be said to be content and good
in the sense of minding only their own business with the least possible harm
(mal) – or benefit – to others. Their most distinctive features would be a senti-
ment of existence and “almost limitless” perfectibility (Ineq. OC 3: 144, 142).
Rousseau introduces “perfectibility” in the context of a brief reflection on
the “moral” or “meta-physical” – in contrast to the “physical” – differentia of
man. On the received view, the specific differentia of man is understanding or
reason. Rousseau is prepared here to allow that since all animals have sensa-
tion, they have ideas, hence some sort of understanding, and that therefore,
as regards understanding, man differs from the other animals only as more
does from less (cp. Ineq. OC 3: 141 with 149f.). However man differs from
the other animals in kind, in that the other animals cannot change their ways
even in circumstances that threaten to destroy them, whereas men can and
do change their ways even to the point of destroying themselves. “It is, then,
not so much the understanding that constitutes the specific difference between
man and the other animals, as it is his property of being a free agent” (Ineq.
OC 3: 141). Strauss always regarded this to be the most important proposi-
tion in the Discourse, and a turning point in modern philosophy (NRH 265,
278f., 280f.; GS 2: 475; PPH 160=GS 3: 182). Rousseau recognizes that free-
dom of the will is subject to much dispute, and he explicitly calls attention to
On Strauss on Rousseau 153

the difference between feeling able to will or to choose, and being able to do
so. We are not free not to feel free (Ineq. OC 3: 142). He therefore suggests
a third differentia, one which he says does not admit of dispute, “perfectibil-
ity” in the individual and in the species. Strauss holds that “perfectibility” is
the modern natural science attempt to remain neutral between accounting for
men’s becoming human beings properly so called by “mechanical causation”
and accounting for it by “essential necessity” – “Epicureanism” or “Platonism,”
“materialism” or “anti-materialism” (NRH 265f.; 272; 271; 172, 173f.). He
denies that there is such a neutral alternative. He calls the Second Discourse a
“physical” inquiry (NRH 266, 268, 272), and he treats “perfectibility” as the
“physical,” “mechanical” form of the freedom that is the fount of man’s mak-
ing his humanity.
Strauss’s metaphysically neutral modern natural science reading of the
Second Discourse – and, indeed, of the whole of Rousseau’s thought – rests on
his interpretation of the pure state of nature as fact and of almost unlimited
perfectibility. The two are complementary. Both stress the utmost indetermi-
nateness: the pure state of nature represents humanity stripped to the bar-
est – “subhuman” – minimum, perfectibility represents it endowed with almost
limitless possibilities. On the basis of these twin claims, Strauss has Rousseau
present man as an initially almost unenformed human prime matter continu-
ally forming and re-forming itself – almost limitlessly “perfecting” itself – in
response to the accidents (concours singuliers de circonstances: Ineq. OC 3:
140; concours fortuit de plusieures causes étrangères: Ineq. OC 3: 162) – floods,
population pressures, earthquakes, or the long-term cumulative effects of ini-
tially imperceptible changes – that buffet it. They are accidents because they do
not work in concert, for the sake of one another or for the sake of whatever
proves to be the outcome of their converging. The faculties they bring into play
release powers greater than the occasion that gave rise to them required. These
surplus powers in turn give rise to new, “artificial,” needs that soon override
the primary needs in their urgency. Strauss holds that insofar as these superve-
nient powers and needs come to be “accepted” and thus to be constitutive of
men’s lives, they are “by artifice or convention” (CM 25f.), and so justify his
conclusion that “what is characteristically human is [on Rousseau’s account]
not the gift of nature but is the outcome of what man did or was forced to do
in order to overcome or to change nature; man’s humanity is the outcome of
the historical process” (NRH 274, 273, 272, 290; JCPM 103f.). Man is where
“. . . a part of nature revolts by natural necessity against all other parts of
nature” (WIPP 176; 175, 180, 191; NRH 173n9, 272, cf. 265).
Now, reflections about the beginnings may inexorably lead to conjectures
about a “human” prime matter. But Rousseau shows that, upon further reflec-
tion, any account of how language-less, affect-less, art-and-convention-less
solitary hominoids might have “invented” reason or language leads, just as
inexorably, to the conclusion that only beings possessed of the faculty for rea-
son, language, art, and convention could have “invented” them. He is fully
154 Victor Gourevitch

alive to the inescapable naïveté of the Man from Missouri. Accordingly, he con-
jectures that man’s state would from the first have been a state of determinate
potentialities. He speaks of perfectibility as a faculty that triggers and “with
the aid of circumstances successively develops” all the other faculties “that nat-
ural man had received in potentiality.”6 Perfectibility does not create or invent
faculties (Ineq. OC 3: 142, 152, 162; cf. 196–8). Nor does it guide, let alone
perfect, the faculties it brings into play. While man may, on Rousseau’s account,
not be or have become rational, or sociable, or much else that that entails, by
his nature, he did or does so according to his nature. His “natural faculties”
may not be active from the first, but always and everywhere the same faculties
develop, always and everywhere in the same order, “successively” (Ineq. OC 3:
127; consider “Intention,” 141).
The structure of the Discourse points in the same direction as does the lan-
guage of “faculties” and “potentialities.” In Part I of the Discourse Rousseau
performs the reductio ad absurdum of the pure state of nature as fact (Ineq.
OC 3: 147–51). Part II of the bipartite Discourse opens dramatically with the
breakdown of the “historical” state of nature and the transition to the civil
state, and then proceeds by flashback to the likely earliest stage of this his-
torical state of nature. That earliest stage differs most conspicuously from the
“pure” state of nature of Part I in that from the first there is language, “crude,
imperfect and more or less such as various Savage Nations have now” (Ineq.
OC 3: 167, EOL OC 5: 395, 406); from the first men occasionally engage in
common undertakings such as hunts (Ineq. OC 3: 166f); and from the first they
display incipient reason (Ineq. OC 3: 165f.). The difference between the two
states is manifest. It would be difficult to exaggerate how much Strauss’s crit-
icism of the Second Discourse, and with it of Rousseau’s thought as a whole,
depends on initially ignoring and then blurring these distinctions.
Strauss focuses most particularly on the status of reason in the Discourse.
“To have reason means to have general ideas” (NRH 270). His Rousseau agrees
with Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke in holding that general ideas – universals – are
not apprehended directly, “by a natural or unconscious process” (NRH 174ff.,
270). There cannot be general ideas without definitions; or definitions without
language; or language without society. Strauss’s Rousseau denies that language
and society are natural to man; and “[s]ince language is not natural, reason
is not natural” (NRH 270; Ineq. OC 3: 150, Emile, OC IV 551). His general
ideas – and hence reason proper – “owe their being” to definitions, human
fiat (NRH 270f.; WIPP 172–7). In the passage about the origin of language
to which Strauss refers, Rousseau declares himself defeated by the question of

6
“Il ne faut pas prendre ici [c.à.d. chez Platon] ce mot de partie dans un sens exact, comme si
Platon supposait l’ame réellement divisible et composée. La division qu’il suppose et qui lui fait
employer le mot de parties ne tombe que sur les divers genres d’opérations par lesquelles l’ame
se modifie, et qu’on appelle autrement facultés” De l’imitation théatrale, OC 5: 1205*; see also,
Aristotle, de anima 411b 6–11.
On Strauss on Rousseau 155

whether language is the necessary condition for society, or society the necessary
condition for language. He is defeated by it because it does not make sense.
Language and society are coeval (Ineq. OC 3: 152; EOL OC 5: 395, 406ff.).
This, to repeat, would also be why Part II of the Discourse begins the inquiry
anew, with men from the first collaborating and in possession of rudimentary
language (Ineq. OC 3: 167).
Strauss on Rousseau on reason marks the peripety in the story he tells both
in “The Intention” and in NRH, the point at which he has the crisis of mod-
ern political philosophy turn into a crisis of philosophy as such (“Intention,”
137f., 143; NRH 252, 273f., 34). He has modern political philosophy set out
to find a stable basis for morals and politics “in the beginnings” (NRH 180);
he has Rousseau show that the beginnings is “a state which completely lacks
all human traits” (NRH 293); he concludes that since reflection on the begin-
nings leads both to the failure to find a stable basis for morals and politics
in the beginnings and to denying autonomy to reason, the crisis of political
philosophy is at the same time the crisis of modern rational philosophy, its
“self-destruction” (SCR 30, 31=GS 1: 53, 54=LAM 256, 257).
Strauss summarizes his interpretation of the Second Discourse in a striking
paragraph:
Rousseau’s thesis that man is by nature good must be understood in the light of his
contention that man is by nature subhuman. Man is by nature good because he is by
nature that subhuman being which is capable of becoming either good or bad. There is
no natural constitution of man to speak of: everything specifically human is acquired or
ultimately depends on artifice or convention. Man is by nature almost infinitely perfect-
ible. There are no natural obstacles to man’s almost unlimited progress or to his power
of liberating himself from evil. For the same reason, there are no natural obstacles to
man’s almost unlimited degradation. Man is by nature almost infinitely malleable. In
the words of the Abbé Raynal, the human race is what we wish to make it. Man has no
nature in the precise sense which would set a limit to what he can make out of himself.
(NRH 271, 272, 274; cf. JCPM 102f=RCPR 243–5)

The reference-less mention of the Abbé Raynal alerts readers to there being no
textual basis whatsoever in any of Rousseau’s own writings for the view that
Strauss here attributes to him in the Abbé’s name.
“Man is by nature good because he is by nature that subhuman being
which is capable of becoming either good or bad” may sound as if Strauss
rejected this view. However, he had said earlier that “[t]he Second Discourse
is decidedly the work of a ‘philosopher’. Morality is regarded there . . . as an
object or as a problem” (NRH 264). He notes that in Socrates’ healthy or true
city evil is “dormant” (HPP 17, CM 95, 97, 104, 129; RCPR 163). As would
goodness, in the active sense of the term, also be dormant in it (Plato, Laws
679c). Good and evil are awakened with the desire for more than bodily health
requires. Socrates attributes their being awakened to what, from the perspec-
tive of the first members of the healthy city can only be described as “accident”
or “chance,” Glaucon in the role of deus ex machina (Plato, Republic 372c;
156 Victor Gourevitch

Aristotle Politics 1253a30). Conscience, as commonly understood, is not

­“natural”: “there is no ‘conscience’ in Plato” (to Kojève 04/22/1957, OT 275);
“Aristotle implicitly denies the conscience”; the Thomist synderesis is based on
belief in biblical revelation (NRH 163f.); Rousseau’s appeals to conscience are
strictly popular in character.
“Man is by nature almost infinitely perfectible. There are no natural obsta-
cles to man’s almost unlimited progress.” How did Rousseau’s “perfectible”
become Strauss’s “progress”? In an earlier writing Strauss had quoted a pas-
sage from Condorcet, who adopted Rousseau’s term “perfectibility,” but in
place of Rousseau’s “almost limitless” claimed that “. . . nature has set no limit
to the perfectibility of human faculties; that man is really indefinitely perfect-
ible; that the progress of this perfectibility which is henceforth independent of
any power that might wish to put a stop to it has no other end point than the
duration of the globe on which nature has cast us.” Strauss comments with a
backward reference to Rousseau and a forward reference to Heidegger: “The
last words betray Condorcet’s (and his predecessors’) ultimate presupposition:
if nature had not cast us on this globe, infinite progress would not be possi-
ble” (PPH 107 n2=GS 3: 126 n85*, citing Esquisse, Prior ed., 66). In NRH
Strauss refers to this Condorcet passage without quoting it (NRH 269n34).
His “[t]here are no natural obstacles to man’s almost unlimited progress . . .”
attributes Condorcet’s perfectibility/progress to Rousseau, just as later in this
paragraph he attributes to him views of the Abbé Raynal. Nowhere does he
mention Rousseau’s saying about the third and last stage of the historical state
of nature, “Here, then, are all our faculties developed . . . and the mind (l’esprit)
almost at the limit of the perfection of which it is capable” (Ineq. OC 3: 174).
“Almost” because “I don’t know of a single philosopher who has as yet been
bold enough to say: this is the limit of what man can attain and beyond which
he cannot go. We do not know what our nature permits us to be” (Emile, OC
4: 281=Ms Fabre, ib. 62; NH 2nd preface, OC 2: 12ff.). Or as, in a different
context, Strauss puts it in his own name, “who are we to believe that we have
found out the limits of human possibilities?” (RCPR 30).
“Man is by nature almost infinitely malleable.” Strauss offers no argu-
ment or explanation for substituting “malleable” for Rousseau’s “perfectible.”
“Malleable” brings to mind the description of man in the hands of God as clay
in the potter’s hand (Jeremiah 18.9; Romans 9.21; SCR 201). Still, it is not the
term Strauss uses when he remarks that the prophets “lack the idea of science
and hence the idea of nature, and hence they can believe that men’s conduct
toward one another can undergo a change much more radical than any change
dreamt of by Plato” (JCPM 399). “Malleable” is clearly designed to dero-
gate. It reduces human life to inert formlessness: Descartes’s wax (“muable”:
Meditations II, Œuvres, Pléiade, 280), or Locke’s gold (“malleable”: Essay IV.
6 ix–xi). On a later occasion Strauss says that according to Machiavelli “the
relation of the founder to his human matter is not fundamentally different
from the relation of a smith to his iron or his inanimate matter: Aristotle did
On Strauss on Rousseau 157

not realize to what extent man is malleable, and in particular malleable by

man” (TM 253; 297; SPPP 167). On yet another occasion he says, “The shift
from formation of character to trust in institutions is the characteristic corol-
lary of the belief in the almost infinite malleability of man” (WIPP 43; NRH
193, 200, TM 281). In other words, not: we can change the human race into
what we wish to make it, but: we can change outcomes by as it were plugging
an unchanging human nature into suitably contrived procedures. The remark
certainly illustrates how equivocal – malleable – Strauss’s “malleable” is.
It would have helped greatly to make the case for “malleable” intelligible if
Strauss or anyone of those who have appropriated the term, had ever given a
single example or cited a single Rousseau passage that depicts man as “mal-
leable” in ways that he could not be said to be malleable according to any
other thinker’s account.7 Does he ever depict humans as more subject to being
fashioned into what circumstances make them be or into what they or we may
wish them to be than do Strauss’s ancient models (NRH 271, 272; 274)? Does
he ever depict human nature “replaced” by history? Let the question at issue in
the Second Discourse – the relation between “physical” and “moral” inequal-
ity – serve as a critical test.
The most immediate object of Rousseau’s conjectures about the state of
nature is to challenge the inveterate prejudice that in “the world as men have
always known it since there have been civil societies,” moral inequalities –
­ruling and being ruled – correspond to unearned physical inequalities, talents,
and gifts. The question of whether those who command are necessarily better
than those who obey “may perhaps be good for Slaves to debate within hearing
of their Masters, but not befitting rational and free Men who seek the truth”
(Ineq. OC 3: 132). He set out to show that among men who are not irrevers-
ibly dependent on one another, natural inequalities would be of little or no
consequence. This, not that the pure state of nature is “fact,” is what he claims
to have proved by the end of Part I of the Discourse (Ineq. OC 3: 160–2). It
is surely one reason why he submitted the Discourse to the judgment of Plato
(Ineq. OC 3: 133, NRH 267n32), and why Strauss “. . . is tempted to say that
Rousseau was the first to meet Plato’s and Aristotle’s challenge to democracy
on the level of Plato’s and Aristotle’s reflections” (“Intention,” 146).
In order to minimize the inevitable political abuses of natural inequalities,
Rousseau proposes that men be considered to “enter” civil society as having
relinquished all received rights and privileges, “morally” equal by right or law,
de droit (SC 3: OC 360f., Emile OC 4: 461, 524f.; NRH 285). Moral equal-
ity by right is one aspect of what Rousseau speaks of as “denaturing” (SC OC
3: 381f, Emile OC 4: 249). It may look like a clear instance of “malleability.”
But Rousseau’s entire political teaching is based on the recognition that moral

7
For a bold speculation about how Rousseau’s “perfectible” might be interpreted as Strauss’s
“malleable,” see R. L. Velkley, Freedom and the End of Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1989), 54–60.
158 Victor Gourevitch

equality and earned moral inequalities, precisely because they are “moral,” that
is to say conventional, are inherently unstable. They must therefore be regu-
larly reconfirmed (SC OC 3: 392; Émile, OC 4: 461, 524f.). Strauss acknowl-
edges that the task of “so to speak changing human nature” and transforming
savages but especially civilized men into citizens in the strong sense which
Rousseau attaches to the term, is never ending (NRH 287; “Intention,” 145;
HPP 60=IPP 243, HPP 32=CM 126). He acknowledges that Rousseau does
not expect men to retain throughout a lifetime, let alone from one generation
to the next, whatever form they may have been made to adopt – any more
than does Plato (e.g., Republic X, 619b–d). Strauss is fond of citing Horace’s
apothegm that, try as we may to expel nature with a pitchfork, it invariably
returns (Epistles I.10.24: NRH 201ff.; OT 203; to Löwith August 15, 1946:
GS 3: 663; SPPP 183, 190, RCPR 26). However much he and Rousseau may
differ in their understanding of nature, that is certainly also Rousseau’s consis-
tent view: “Comme on n’étouffe jamais parfaitement la nature, l’homme social
reste toujours imparfait” (Emile, OC 4: 1268 n.(a)ad 56, 469, 247f.).

Initially Strauss charged Rousseau with taking it for granted that inqui-
ries into the origin and foundations of political society call for inquiries into
the state of nature (NRH 266). However, directly after criticizing Rousseau’s
account of the state of nature, he acknowledges that Rousseau “is not alto-
gether wrong” when he says that all political philosophers have sought to go
back to the state of nature. For there is a “necessary connection between the
question concerning the existence, as well as the content of natural right and
the question concerning the sanctions for natural right, the latter question being
identical with the question of the status of man within the whole, or of man’s
origin” (NRH 275f., 95–7; Ineq. OC 3: 132). In other words, inquiries into the
origin and foundations of civil society that proceed by way of “social reality
as we know it in actual life, and the world as men have known it since there
have been civil societies,” inevitably confront essentially the same problems
and reach essentially the same conclusions as does “modern natural science”
regarding the content and sanctions for natural right, or “the status of man
within the whole or of man’s origin” (NRH 95–7, 150n24 i.f., 173n9).8
8
Upon quoting Rousseau’s remark that the lawgiver’s genius “makes and creates everything out
of nothing,” Strauss remarks that this is the classical view which Rousseau still shared and
sought to restore (SC OC 3: 381, WIPP 83n5=RCPR 53n5); he writes to Löwith that he thinks
it impossible to give an unqualified answer to the question whether the polis is by or according
to nature (08/20/46=GS 3: 668); he allows that there may well not be an idea of the city (CM
92ff., 120); in a seminar he says unqualifiedly that “the polis is not natural” (OPS 242).
  In discussing the attempt that Plato entrusts to the Athenian Stranger to prove that soul and
intellection are “prior” to body, Strauss details the objections to which the Stranger’s proof is
exposed far more fully than he does any tenet that it might seek to establish (AAPL 146–50).
“The insecurity of man and everything human is not an absolutely terrifying abyss if the high-
est of which man knows is absolutely secure. Plato’s Athenian Stranger does not indeed experi-
ence that support, that refuge and fortress as the Biblical prophets experienced it, but he does
the second best: he tries to demonstrate its existence” (SCR 11=LAM 235; OPS 235f.).
On Strauss on Rousseau 159

Strauss’s Plato replaces the gods by the unchangeable Ideas (RCPR 200),
and Strauss replaces the unchangeable Platonic Ideas by “the problems perma-
nent or coeval with man” (NRH 35, 99–101, TM 14); he occasionally speaks
of nature being “discovered or invented” (RCPR 253=JPCM 111, cf. NRH
81); and hence of “the idea of nature” rather than of “nature” simply (e.g.,
NRH 82, 92, 88). “There is no Platonic Nature or Truth” (CM 56). Strauss’s
Aristotle attributes our highest activities to his god rather than have our high-
est activities apprehend the god’s activities (LAM 8; Aristotle, Nicomachean
Ethics 1177b26–30, Metaphysics 1072b24–31).
Broadly speaking, Strauss divides Rousseau’s history since the conjectural
contract instituting civil society in two: the “hypothetical history of govern-
ment” until “now,” and the legitimate civil society henceforth. He reads the
end of the Second Discourse as announcing this break (Ineq. OC 3: 191), and
the Social Contract as the outline of the new, simply good or legitimate society
(NRH 264n26, 267n32, 275).
Strauss speaks of Rousseau’s knowledge of the principles of the good or
legitimate political order as the unanticipated and unanticipatable outcome
of accidents; and the recognition that “[t]he good order or the rational is the
result of forces which do not themselves tend toward the good order or the
rational” is the principle of “the discovery of history.” “The discovery of his-
tory” inevitably coincides with the proclamation of its end (NRH 274, 315). In
Natural Right and History, Strauss attributes to Rousseau the view that “now”
there is “wisdom,” “perfect knowledge of the true public right” (NRH 274,
273), “understanding for the first time in an adequate manner what is right
and wrong politically and morally” (NRH 315; cf. TM 217, 116). “Now” is
“Rousseau’s moment” (NRH 273, cf. 29; however, see note 14 to this essay).
Strauss has him reason: Since in the state of nature men would be free of
contradiction with themselves and with one another, “[c]ivil society must . . .
be transcended not in the direction of man’s highest end but of his beginning,
his earliest past . . . the good life consists in the closest approximation to the
state of nature which is possible on the level of humanity” (NRH 282; TM
78, Aristotle, Pol. 1253a 27f.). He has him consider three approximations to

  “Nature was discovered when the possibility was realized that the first things may produce
all other things, not by means of forethought, but by blind necessity. I say: the possibility.
It was not excluded that the origin of all things is forethought, divine forethought. But this
assertion required from now on a demonstration. The characteristic outcome of the discov-
ery of nature is the demand for rigorous demonstration of the existence of divine beings, for
a demonstration that starts from the analysis of phenomena manifest to everyone. Since no
demonstration can presuppose the demonstrandum, philosophy is radically atheistic. The dif-
ference between Plato and a materialist like Democritus fades into insignificance if compared
with the difference between Plato and any doctrine based on religious experience. Plato’s and
Aristotle’s attempts to demonstrate the existence of God far from proving the religious charac-
ter of their teaching, actually disprove it” (“Reason and Revelation” in H. Meier, Leo Strauss
and the Theologico-Political Problem, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 145ff.;
cf. PAW 109f, 130, RCPR 255ff.).
160 Victor Gourevitch

“the state of nature on the level of humanity”: on the political plane, on the
moral plane, and on the individual plane. In all three cases, he proceeds on the
premise that what defines Rousseau’s state of nature is the instinct or the care
for self-preservation and the enjoyment of “subhuman bliss” (NRH 270, 283,
284). He never considers the state of nature as a model in the senses in which
Rousseau presents it, as conjectures about ways in which men might attend
each to his own good with the least possible harm – or benefit – to others and
the good of each might therefore compose with the good of all and so con-
form to the common good. By contrast, “. . . dans l’état social, le bien de l’un
fait nécessairement le mal de l’autre. Ce rapport est dans l’essence de la chose,
et rien ne saurait le changer” (Emile OC 4:340*). Nor does he consider the
extent to which Rousseau’s conjectures about the state of nature are designed
to criticize and to purge not only Hobbes’s “political Epicureanism” (NRH
188f.), Locke’s “joyless quest for joy” (NRH 251), and the decadent society
of the ancien regime (“Nihilism” 359), but any fevered city (NRH 253, 280f.;
LM OC 3: 881).
Strauss reads the Social Contract as Rousseau’s “closest approximation to
the state of nature which is possible on the level of humanity” on the political
plane, indeed, as the instauration or restoration of a true society, of a “more
perfect society than had ever existed before” (“Intention,” 141f., NRH 259f.).
It seeks to contain and as far as possible to mitigate the evils attendant on
men’s being irreversibly dependent on one another materially and morally. It
does not ever pretend to avoid or to eliminate them altogether. Its opening clar-
ion call announces that it may prove possible to legitimate the chains of civil
society, not that they should or could be broken. Its premise is that, absent nat-
ural sanctions, justice and utility can be reconciled in the civil state only if the
public interest is in everyone’s self-interest. Rousseau’s well-known proposal is
for an “. . . association that will defend and protect the person and the goods
of each associate with the full common force, and by means of which each,
uniting with all, nevertheless obeys only himself and remains as free as before”
(Social Contract, OC 3: 360). They are both subjects and sovereign. Strauss
glosses “as free as before” to mean “as free as in the state of nature,” “as free
as in the state of nature” to mean “being judge in one’s own case,” and “being
judge in one’s own case” to mean “being judge of the means required for one’s
self-preservation” (NRH 283, 284f.; “Intention,” 141). “The root of civil soci-
ety must then be sought exclusively in the desire for self-preservation or in the
right for self-preservation” (NRH 283).
The primacy of the desire and the right for self-preservation character-
ize what Strauss calls “modern natural right,” in contrast to the primacy of
the desire and the pursuit of perfection that characterize what he calls “clas-
sical natural right”: freedom from in contrast to freedom for. His stress on
“self-preservation,” like his account of Rousseau’s pure state of nature as “fact”
and of perfectibility as “malleability,” seeks out the lowest common human –
indeed, a less than human – denominator. Yet he acknowledges that Rousseau
On Strauss on Rousseau 161

counts freedom as a greater good than life itself (NRH 278; Ineq. OC 3: 183f.).
Rousseau occasionally speaks of freedom in ways reminiscent of how Plato
speaks about spiritedness: “As an untamed steed . . . struggles impetuously at
the sight of the bit while a trained horse patiently suffers whip and spur, so
barbarous man will not bend his head to the yoke which civilized man bears
without a murmur, and he prefers the most tempestuous freedom to tranquil
subjection” (Ineq. OC 3: 181f., 221; cf. Ineq. epigraph with Social Contract,
OC 3: 353). Freedom as spiritedness is also an element in what Rousseau
calls “civil freedom.” It is in the name of freedom as spiritedness that he calls
Cato “the greatest of men” (Ineq. OC 3: 192, PE OC 3: 255, cf. NRH 318)
and that he prefers a measure of religious enthusiasm to religious indifference
(Emile OC 4: 632*ff.). Freedom so understood may not be suited to every
clime or temperament (Ineq. OC 3: 112ff.). Still, “a little agitation energizes
souls, and what causes the species truly to prosper is not so much peace as
freedom” (Social Contract, OC 3: 120), “perilous freedom” (Social Contract,
OC 3: 405, 355f., Poland, OC 3: 954f.). Freedom so understood is at the heart
of what, in a very different context and on just one occasion, Strauss calls
the Spinoza-Rousseau-Kant “version of modern republicanism which takes its
bearings by the dignity of every man rather than by the narrowly conceived
interest of every man” (SCR 16 = JPCM 155).
“The dignity of every man” is one reason why Rousseau has everyone
“entering” the civil association as everyone else’s “moral” equal, sovereign
and subject of the general will declaring itself as laws ratified by all and thus
“self-imposed.” Moral, political inequalities have to be earned by contributions
to the public good and to be periodically confirmed (Social Contract OC 3: 426,
435f.). Strauss views the general will as Rousseau’s attempt to find a “‘realistic’
substitute for the traditional natural law” (NRH 276), i.e., for the law of rea-
son (NRH 270f): “. . . my desire transforms itself into a rational desire by being
‘generalized’, . . . a desire which survives the test of ‘generalization’ is, by this
very fact, proved to be rational and hence just” (NRH 276f., 285; IPP 97f.).
Rousseau puts it as follows: “When a law is proposed in the People’s assembly,
what they are being asked is not exactly whether they approve the proposal or
reject it, but whether it does or does not conform to the general will . . .”, i.e.,
“. . . is it advantageous to the State . . .” (Social Contract, OC 3: 440f., 338): it is
rational because it is just.
It is altogether striking that in his extended discussions of Rousseau, Strauss
never mentions that natural aristocracy prevails in his historical state of nature
and that he regards elective aristocracy – “democracy wisely tempered” – to be
the best government in the civil state: for “. . . the best and most natural order is
to have the wisest govern the multitude” (Ineq. OC 3: 186f., SC OC 3: 406f.;
First Discourse OC 3: 28–30; Ineq. OC 3: 193, 186, 222f.). Nor does he con-
sider Rousseau’s fullest sketch of an elective aristocracy, the Considerations
on the Government of Poland, in which Rousseau goes so far as to borrow
from Plato’s Republic and Laws some of the titles which he assigns to various
162 Victor Gourevitch

political offices. Instead, he speaks of “Rousseau’s criticism of the aristocratic

principle of the classics” (NRH 286n57), that is to say, of their conception of
distributive justice. What Rousseau points out in the two passages to which
Strauss refers in this connection (Narcisse OC 2: 965, Ineq. OC 3: 222f.) is
that distributive justice cannot be reduced to law without residue or remainder.
Strauss implies that no such difficulties arise for the classics. In “The Intention”
he had recognized that they are inescapable (“Intention,” 145; NRH 140–3).
With “the total alienation of each associate with all his rights to the whole
community,” all rights become social rights. “The absorption of natural right
by the positive law of a properly qualified democracy would be defensible
if there were a guarantee that the general will . . . could not err” (NRH 286;
“Intention,” 142). What would constitute such a guarantee?
The general will is the exercise of sovereignty (Social Contract, OC 3: 368,
Emile OC 4: 841, 843), and “[t]he sovereign, by the mere fact that it is, is all
that it ought to be” (Social Contract, OC 3: 363; NRH 286, 192f.; WIPP 195).
Strauss holds that this doctrine of sovereignty collapses the distinction between
model or standard and instances, and that with it, it collapses the distinction
between ought and is, the rational and the real, reason and authority (WIPP
51,88f., IPP 91; OT 210). “The general will, the will immanent in societies of
a certain kind”, namely of “a society properly constructed in accordance with
natural law,” replaces “transcendent,” “vertical” natural right by “horizon-
tal” limitations in the form of generalizations. Yet in the very next paragraph,
Strauss calls the “vertical” natural right “which essentially transcends every
human reality” an “assumption” (WIPP 51f.; NRH 183; OT 212). How would
vertical assumptions guarantee that the general will cannot err?
Strauss frequently follows Plato in comparing political knowledge to medi-
cal knowledge, political judgment to a physician’s diagnostic skills, and polit-
ical action to medical treatment (NRH 101f.; 161, 162, 153, 192, WIPP 84,
87, 89). He is categorical: “A social science that cannot speak of tyranny with
the same confidence with which medicine speaks, for example, of cancer, can-
not understand social phenomena as what they are” (OT 177=WIPP 95). Yet
he speaks of “intelligent and virtuous tyranny” (CM 238; AAPL 56f., 86 and
Plato, Laws, 709e6–710e2), and of “good,” “beneficent,” “excellent” tyrants
(OT 72; 76f.; 187f.; RCPR 147). What might count as a good or a beneficent
cancer?
Rousseau’s sound or good or legitimate political society is clearly the product
of a capacious reason reflecting on the entire human condition in the light of “the
nature of things,” not of a purely formal, “generalizing” or “horizontal” reason.
Still, however wise and great-souled a lawgiver may be, his work is not done by
one man once and for all. It requires successive generations of public-spirited
citizen-lawgivers exercising their “sublime reason” and ­“wisdom” (“Intention,”
143, SC 3: 381). But, of course, they can err (Rêveries OC 1: 1077).One possi-
ble safeguard – certainly not a guarantee – against errors is to call for regular
assemblies that would re-confirm the laws and the magistrates who administer
On Strauss on Rousseau 163

them (SC OC 3: 425–8, 435f.). Strauss criticizes this proposal for the same rea-
son that the civil and the ecclesiastical authorities in Paris and in Geneva had
the Social Contract and the Emile publicly burned, and warrants issued for their
author’s arrest: such assemblies threaten to challenge established authorities and
beliefs. Rousseau counters that, on the contrary, they would only revivify and
strengthen the presumption in favor of the laws and their ministers (Ineq. OC
3: 112, 114; Geneva ms OC 3: 295; Social Contract, OC 3: 424f.; Machiavelli,
Discourses I.58; The Federalist Nos. 49, 50). In the absence of guarantees, the
general will of a well-ordered Rousseauan civil society declaring itself as laws
ratified by all and subject to regular review may prove to be the closest reason-
ably stable political equivalent to the rule of living intelligence.
Strauss is less sanguine. He holds that heeding the general will requires a
degree of “collectivization” (NRH 265; RCCP, 40) that inevitably blunts and
enervates intellectual ambition, and causes philosophy or science to be diluted
and absorbed by “culture” (Intention 143). One one occasion he goes so far as
to assert that “[i]f the ultimate criterion of justice becomes the general will, i.e.,
the will of a free society, cannibalism is as just as its opposite. Every institution
hallowed by a folk-mind has to be regarded as sacred” (WIPP 51; “Intention,”
143f., NRH 289f, 14f.).

Strauss has Rousseau consider “the closest approximation to the state of

nature on the level of humanity” on the moral plane in a much discussed pas-
sage of the Social Contract:

What man loses by the social contract is his natural freedom and an unlimited right to
everything that tempts him and he can reach; what he gains is civil freedom and prop-
erty in everything he possesses. . . . To the preceding one might add to the acquirement of
the civil state moral freedom, which alone makes man truly master of himself; for the
impulsion of mere appetite is slavery, and obedience to the law one has prescribed to
oneself is freedom. (Social Contract, I OC 3: 364f.)

This is Rousseau’s only mention of “moral freedom” (see however Emile, OC

4: 1541, var. (d)).
Strauss reads the passage as drawing a distinction between three kinds
of freedom – natural, civil, and moral; and he charges that no sooner has
Rousseau drawn this distinction than he deliberately – it is “no accidental
error” – blurs it (NRH 281f.). He presumably blurs it because he presum-
ably wants to obfuscate what Strauss argues is his true view, that in the final
analysis natural freedom, the absence of any order or rule to which men might
be in duty bound, is and remains his model. Recalling, again, Rousseau’s ini-
tial formula for the social contract: “. . . a form of association . . . by means of
which each, uniting with all, nevertheless obey only himself and remain as
free as before” (Social Contract, OC 3: 360), Strauss comments: “This means
that natural freedom remains the model for civil freedom” (NRH 281). Later,
in an unrelated context, he acknowledges that Rousseau’s natural freedom is
164 Victor Gourevitch

the model for his civil freedom only in the strictly formal sense that in both
the state of nature and the civil state men would be free of being subject to
another’s individual will: in the state of nature they would be free from being
dependent on one another physically and morally; in the legitimate civil state
they are free from being subject to another’s individual will because all are by
right subject only to the general will or, as Rousseau notes, to reason and to
its laws. To repeat: in the state of nature they are equal because free, in the
civil state they are free because equal (NRH 285= “Intention,” 141f.; Social
Contract, OC 3: 360f., 364). Strauss goes on to claim that Rousseau’s natu-
ral freedom is also the model for his moral freedom, for “[c]ivil freedom . . .
being in a way obedience to one’s self alone, certainly comes very close to
moral freedom” (NRH 281). He certainly brings them very close by speaking
of civil freedom as “in a way obedience to one’s self alone” and “translating”
Rousseau’s characterization of moral freedom – l’obéissance à la loi qu’on
s’est prescritte est liberté (“obedience to the law one has prescribed to one-
self is freedom”) – as “freedom is obedience to the law which one has given
to one’s self” (Social Contract, OC 3: 365; NRH 278). “One’s self” shifts
Rousseau’s stress on obedience and law as collective self-legislation to a stress
on individual self and freedom, from the general to the singular will, from
de-individuation to individuation.9
Strauss’s Hobbes had suggested that “meaning, order, or truth originates
solely in man’s creative action”; “[w]hat Hobbes had suggested . . . in regard to
science, was applied by Rousseau to morality” (NRH 280f.; 172–4). Strauss
has his Rousseau “graft” unconditional duties and virtues upon “a right or
freedom which is radically and specifically human” (NRH 280). He conceives
of “. . . the fundamental freedom, or of the fundamental right, as such a creative
act as issues in the establishment of unconditional duties and in nothing else:
freedom is essentially self-legislation. The ultimate outcome of this attempt was
the substitution of freedom for virtue or the view that it is not virtue which
makes man free but freedom which makes man virtuous” (NRH 281=JPCM
103). Strauss never tells what Rousseau’s unconditional duties might be.
“Unconditional” evokes Kant’s moral teaching rather than Rousseau’s. Indeed,
when Strauss concludes: “the ultimate outcome of this attempt,” the “novel
understanding of moral freedom” (NRH 281, 282), his formulations once
again alert the reader to his no longer speaking about anything Rousseau him-
self says or that in any evident way follows from anything he says. The point
of his exceptionally tortuous argument – “It is true . . .”, “But it is also true . . .”,
“At any rate . . .” (NRH 281f.) – is that the moral teaching which Kant will
articulate “originated in the notion that the primary moral phenomenon is the
freedom of the state of nature” (NRH 282; WIPP 52; SPPP 145). That may

9
Moral freedom: obéissance à la loi qu’on s’est prescritte, Social Contract, OC 3: 365; Civil free-
dom: Le Peuple soumis aux lois doit en être l’auteur, Social Contract, OC 3: 380; so that “. . .
chaque homme, obéissant au souverain, n’obéit qu’à lui-même. . . ,” Emile, OC 4: 841.
On Strauss on Rousseau 165

be. But it remains unevident that Rousseau’s single mention of moral freedom
intends or entails it (NRH 292).

Strauss begins and ends his NRH Rousseau discussion by observing that
Rousseau does not think that even the free society of the Social Contract pro-
vides the solution to the human problem (NRH 261, 290; “Intention,” 142f.).
He holds that it is a measure of Rousseau’s greatness to have recognized that
it does not (NRH 255; WIPP 270). This is the area of their most fundamental
agreement.10 He indicates this agreement most fully in his discussion of the
First Discourse in “The Intention” and in the NRH summary of this discussion
(“Intention,” 000f., cf. LAM, x). However, both “The Intention” and the NRH
Rousseau chapter end with sharp criticisms of the status of philosophy after
Rousseau. Both equivocate about whether or in what sense this “crisis of phi-
losophy” is due to Rousseau’s teaching.
The First Discourse and Rousseau’s writings in defense of it forcefully state the
case for the classical understanding of philosophy and of the philosopher who
alone leads the truly free, essentially trans-social life. That is also how Strauss
understands the philosopher and the philosophical life (“Intention,” 130f., 133,
137, 138f.; Aristotle NE 10.7 1177a28–1178b1; cf. JPCM 109=RCPR 250f.)11
“. . . if the [Epicurean] gods are not, [then] the most divine being, most resplendent,
most beneficent, and most high in rank is the wise man with his frail happiness
. . . Besides, the Epicurean sage has as little incentive to charity – to feeding the
hungry and clothing the naked – as the Epicurean gods; like the Epicurean gods
he is beneficent by being what he is rather than by doing anything” (LAM 131,
119f.). “Frail happiness” echoes Emile’s tutor (Emile, 4: 503). Now, Rousseau’s
understanding of the philosopher and the philosophical life forces the reader to
wonder anew whether this understanding is not the model for his understanding
of pre-social life, in short of the state of nature. Be that as it may.
If “utility and truth are two entirely different things,” “. . . society must do
everything possible to render the citizen oblivious of the very facts that polit-
ical philosophy brings to the center of their attention as the foundations of
society. Free society stands or falls by a specific obfuscation against which phi-
losophy necessarily revolts. The problem posed by political philosophy must
be forgotten if the solution to which political philosophy leads is to work”
(“Intention,” 143=NRH 287f.).12 What Strauss here calls obfuscation is what

10
“Finite, relative problems can be solved; infinite, absolute problems cannot be solved. In other
words, human beings will never create a society which is free from contradictions” (SCR 6);
the Socratic “what is. . .” question recognizes “. . .that there is an essential difference between the
common good and the private or sectional good” (RCPR 132; Plato, Phaedo 98b2ff.).
11
“To lead the just life means to lead a retired life, the retired life par excellence, the life of the phi-
losopher. This is the manifest secret of the Republic.. . . Justice is said to consist in minding one’s
own business, that is to say, in not serving others” (RCPR 161; 282; CM 127ff.; PPH 161ff.=GS
3:183; Plato, Republic 370a4, 433ab; PuG 121ff.=GS 2:122ff.; NRH 151–3).
12
“in order to be useful to the city, the requirements of wisdom must be diluted” NRH 152; see
also note 8 to this essay.
166 Victor Gourevitch

elsewhere he calls exotericism. Rousseau assigns the task of reconciling the

truths that philosophy or science lays bare about the origins of civil society
with the requirements of citizenship to the Lawgiver and his surrogates, the
general will, the civil religion, and the society’s distinctive ways, its mœurs. In
Strauss’s view this teaching about and by the Lawgiver is not a popular or civil
teaching but a philosophic or scientific teaching that is “. . . part of the whole
edifice of philosophy or science, presupposing [modern] natural science and
crowning it” (“Intention,” 140, 146). Absent a Lawgiver,
“[t]he easiest way out of this predicament, the way that ‘the next generation’ could not
help choosing, was to accept . . . [Rousseau’s] final and practical solution, (his ‘rediscov-
ery of the community,’ his notion of the general will, the primacy of conscience or of
sentiment and tradition) and to throw overboard, or to forget, his theoretical premise
(‘the state of nature,’ the independent individual, the primacy of theoretical reason). The
simplest solution of Rousseau’s problem is the ‘romantic’ solution. It may be said to be
a genuine solution since it consists precisely in doing what Rousseau himself demanded
for the era following the establishment, or restoration, of a true society – namely in
forgetting the ‘individualistic’ premise and keeping all one’s thoughts and wishes within
the compass of man’s social life. The price which has to be paid for it, is, directly or
indirectly, the subordination of philosophy to society, or the integration of philosophy
into ‘culture’” (“Intention,” 143f.; NRH 12,254ff.; SCR 2=JPCM 138ff.).13

Is not “the subordination of philosophy to society or the integration of phi-

losophy into ‘culture’” very precisely what Rousseau opposed from the First
Discourse on? To say that it is the price that had to be paid “directly or indi-
rectly” for Rousseau’s genuine practical proposal implies both that it is the
inevitable price for popular sovereignty declaring itself as the general will, and
that Rousseau himself did not realize that this would be the price. How, then,
may he be said to have “demanded” it? Does “the next generation” that “could
not help choosing” the “final and practical solution” which Strauss here attrib­
utes to Rousseau refer to Kant and to Hegel?14 How are we to understand that
Kant and Hegel “could not help choosing” this or that view?

“The Intention” ends by charging Rousseau with “demanding” and caus-

ing the absorption of philosophy by culture; the Natural Right and History

13
“It is therefore no accident that the general will and ‘aesthetics’ came into the world at about
the same time” (PPH 161n2=GS 3: 182n118; RCPR 244, 218ff.).
14
“Rousseau’s concept of the general will which as such cannot err – which merely by being is
what it ought to be – showed how the gulf between the is and the ought can be overcome.
Strictly speaking, Rousseau showed this only under the condition that his doctrine of the general
will, his political doctrine proper, is linked with his doctrine of the historical process, and this
linking was the work of Rousseau’s great successors, Kant and Hegel, rather than of Rousseau
himself. According to this view, the rational or just society, the society characterized by the exis-
tence of a general will known to be the general will, i.e. the ideal, is necessarily actualized by the
historical process without men’s intending to actualize it” (“The Three Waves of Modernity,” a
lecture delivered about a decade after the publication of NRH: IPP 91).
On Strauss on Rousseau 167

Rousseau section ends with the related charge that his last work, The Reveries
of the Solitary Walker, replaces “the wakefulness of philosophic contempla-
tion” by “the dreamlike character of solitary contemplation” which is “alto-
gether different from, not to say hostile to, thinking or observation” (NRH
293, 291f.). Does Strauss call the Solitary Walker’s contemplations “dream-
like” for any other reason than that he sometimes speaks of them as “reveries”?
He certainly discusses them as arguments. He had called the Second Discourse
“Rousseau’s most philosophic work” and “decidedly the work of a philoso-
pher” (NRH 264). Soon after its publication, Rousseau, in a letter to Voltaire,
spoke of it as “a sketch (ébauche) of his sad reveries” (OC 3: 226). “The type of
man foreshadowed by Rousseau, which justifies civil society by transcending it
is no longer the philosopher but what later came to be called the ‘artist’” who
regards himself as the conscience of society (NRH 293). Does “foreshadowed”
imply that Rousseau anticipated or intended this consequence? In the next,
long, last paragraph of this Rousseau section, Strauss goes on to expand on this
interpretation of the Reveries:
The notion that the good life consists in the return on the level of humanity to the state
of nature, i.e., to a state which completely lacks all human traits, necessarily leads to the
consequence that the individual claims such an ultimate freedom from society as lacks
any definite human content. But this fundamental defect of the state of nature as the
goal of human aspiration was in Rousseau’s eyes its perfect justification: the very indef-
initeness of the state of nature as a goal of human aspiration made that state the ideal
vehicle of freedom. . . . It was the ideal basis for an appeal from society to something
indefinite and undefinable, to an ultimate sanctity of the individual as individual, unre-
deemed and unjustified. This was precisely what freedom came to mean for a consid-
erable number of men. Every freedom which is freedom for something, every freedom
which is justified by reference to something higher than the individual or than man as
mere man, necessarily restricts freedom or, which is the same thing, establishes a tenable
distinction between freedom and license. It makes freedom conditional on the purpose
for which it is claimed. Rousseau is distinguished from many of his followers by the fact
that he saw clearly the disproportion between this undefined and undefinable freedom
and the requirements of civil society. (NRH 293f.)

How are we to understand a “return” “on the level of humanity” “to a state
which completely lacks all human traits”? Wherever does Rousseau claim or
even imply that the good life consists in such a “return”? And, again, is he
accountable for views of “followers” whose views differ from his own?
On the principle that “[i]t is safer to try to understand the low in the light
of the high than the high in the light of the low” (SCR 2=JPCM 138), it seems
safer to read the Reveries as what Strauss on one occasion calls “an example
of, and an apology for, the natural or good man who is, or is becoming, wise
without being virtuous” (“Intention,” 139).