5M
PARTISAN REVIEW
CREEPING NIHILISM
NATURAL RIGHT AND HISTORY. By Leo Strauss. University of Chicago
Press. $5.00.
The interest in the problems of natural right or natural law
has increased remarkably in this century. This trend has been observed
in Europe since the first World War, and now it is to be observed
in this country. The causes, however, differ. Perhaps the most impor–
tant is the perception that a positivistic theory of law cannot ade–
quately defend us against the unlimited power of the totalitarian state.
But no less obvious is the motive of wishing to restrict the freedom of
the individual in favor of a more "organic" or "natural" structure of
society. The intellectual level of the new books on these problems varies
considerably. For the most part they lack the conceptual clarity re–
quisite to handling questions so intricate and emotionally charged.
It
is
the merit of Leo Strauss's work that it is written with a lucidity that
makes it easier to show wherein its main fallacies lie.
Strauss deplores the breakdown of the classical tradition of natural
right, which was affected, chiefly, by three developments of modern
thought: non-teleological natural science, the position that has become
known as Historicism, and the distinction between facts and values. He
restricts his criticism to the latter two, leaving aside the first and per–
haps the most important one. Historicism-a term peculiar to German
thinking-means that the recognition of historical changes in human
beliefs and convictions destroys the idea of an eternally valid "Truth."
Strauss attempts to demonstrate that Historicism is self-contradictory:
if "all human thoughts or beliefs are historical," then Historicism itself
is historical. This argument is based on the ambiguity of the word
"thought."
It
is a word which, like the German
Geist,
embraces the
most dissimilar kinds of mental activity, logic and mathematics as well
as the natural cultural sciences, religious beliefs as well as political ideas,
all of which differ in their pattern of historical change. The distinction
between objective knowledge and socio-historical dynamics was stressed
even by so outstanding an "historicist" as Karl Marx, and the Anglo–
Saxon thinkers, from Bacon and Hume to our contemporaries, are in–
clined to say that moral and political value-judgments are incapable
of being either true or false, since they arj;: not assertions about matters
of fact but directives of feeling and action.
If
we bear this difference
in mind, we can hardly find any self-contradiction in the statement that
there are no absolute values.
No less objectionable are the methods used by Strauss in his futile
