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Pluralism and Faith William E. Connolly Relativism and Faith Straussianism is the only professorial movement in the United States that has attained the standing of a public philosophy. Since at least the late 1970s, its proponents have not only played a significant role in the academy but have served as advisers to the president when a Republican holds office and as talking heads on news channels such as Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC when Republicans are in or out of office. The tendency is to counsel respect, in the name of civic virtue, for the presidency when a Republican holds office and to subject the incumbent to sharp critique when a Democrat holds office. Reagan and the two Bushes have been recipients of the first honor; Carter and Clinton recipients of the second line of attack. Let’s explore the contribution that Leo Strauss himself has made to contemporary Straussian public philosophy , as well as limits he may set to such a movement. In Liberalism: Ancient and Modern, published in the 1960s, Strauss argues in favor of a classical liberal education and against the shape modern liberalism has taken. Liberal education, in the classic sense, prepares an elite of gentlemen to lift mass democracy to a higher level of achievement: Liberal education is the counterpoison to mass culture, to the corroding effects of mass culture, to its inherent tendency to produce nothing but ‘‘specialists without spirit and voluptuaries without heart.’’ Liberal education is the ladder by which we try to ascend from mass democracy to democracy as originally meant. Liberal education is the necessary endeavor to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society. Liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracy who have ears to hear, of human greatness.1 2 78 PLURALISM A ND FAITH Waiving reservations about his use of the term mass, I agree that liberal education makes an indispensable contribution to the nobility of democracy. The issue is: What type of nobility to foster? What kind of civic virtue to nourish? A chapter entitled ‘‘The Liberalism of Classical Political Philosophy’’ provides insight into Strauss’s view. Here Strauss reviews a book by Eric Havelock on liberalism in classical Greek political philosophy . Havelock writes before the philosophy of John Rawls had achieved hegemony among liberal academics in America. Strauss, while rebuking Havelock for ‘‘unsurpassed shallowness and crudity’’ in his reading of Greek classics, also gives us an idea of how the ‘‘modern liberalism’’ of which Havelock is a prototype looks to him.2 My purpose is not to defend Havelock’s reading of ancient Greek thinkers but to probe Strauss’s account of modern liberalism through his critique of Havelock. Havelock, he says, thinks that every value is ‘‘‘negotiable’ because he is extremely tolerant.’’3 Strauss himself wonders whether tolerance can be spread so widely, ‘‘whether Tolerance can remain tolerant when confronted with unqualified Intolerance.’’4 The modern liberal also asserts, crucially, ‘‘that man’s being is accidental to the universe,’’5 though he is mistaken if he imagines that most classical Greek thinkers agreed with him. The modern liberal also thinks ‘‘that man’s nature and therewith morality are essentially changing.’’6 Strauss, reasonably enough, objects to Havelock’s critique of Plato for not having set forth liberalism before criticizing it. ‘‘Plato failed to set forth the liberal view,’’ Strauss says, ‘‘because the liberal view did not exist.’’7 Plato criticized sophistry, not liberalism . But why did he use myth as well as argument to do so? We on our part suggest this explanation. Plato knew that most men read more with their ‘‘imagination’’ than with open-minded care and are therefore much more bene- fited by salutary myths than by the naked truth. Precisely the liberals who hold that morality is historical or of merely human origin must go on to say . . . that this invaluable acquisition . . . is ‘‘too precious to be gambled with’’: the greatest enemies of civilization in civilized countries are those who squander the heritage . . . ; civilization is much less endangered by narrow but loyal preservers than by the shallow and glib futurists, who, being themselves rootless, try to destroy all roots and thus do everything in their power in order to bring back the initial chaos and promiscuity. The first duty of civilized man is then to respect his past.8 Again: ‘‘There is undoubtedly some kinship between the modern liberal and the ancient sophist. Both are unaware of the existence of a problem of civilization...

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