L. Strauss - ''What Do Liberal & Conservative Mean Here & Now'' 1968

Preface
Liberalism is understood here and now in contradistinction to conserva¬

tism. This distinction is sufficient for most present practical purposes. To
admit this is tantamount to admitting that the distinction is not free from
theoretical difficulties which need not be barren of practical consequences.
Of one difficulty one can dispose easily. Most people are liberal in some
respects and conservative in others; a very moderate liberal may not be
distinguishable from a very moderate conservative. This very observation
implies, indeed, the existence at least of the liberal and the conservative
as ideal types. Yet in this case, at any rate, the ideal types are quite real.
Here and now a man who is in favor of the war on poverty and opposed
to the war in Vietnam is generally regarded as doubtlessly a liberal, and a
man who is in favor of the war in Vietnam and opposed to the war on
poverty is generally regarded as doubtlessly a conservative.
A somewhat more serious difficulty comes to sight once one considers the
fact that here and now liberalism and conservativism have a common basis;
for both are based here and now on liberal democracy, and therefore both
are antagonistic to Communism. Hence the opposition does not seem to
be fundamental. Still, they differ profoundly in their opposition to Com¬
munism. At first glance liberalism seems to agree with Communism as
regards the ultimate goal, while it radically disagrees with it as regards the
way to the goal. The goal may be said to be the universal and classless
society or, to use the correction proposed by Koj£ve, the universal and
homogeneous state of which every adult human being is a full member;
more precisely, the necessary and sufficient title to full membership is
supplied by one’s being an adult nonmoronic human being for all those
times when he is not locked up in an insane asylum or a penitentiary. The
way toward that goal, according to liberalism in contradistinction to
Communism, is preferably democratic or peaceful, surely not war, that is,
vii
viii / Preface
foreign war; for revolutions backed by the sympathy, or at least the inter¬
ests, of the majority of the people concerned are not necessarily rejected
by liberals. There remains, however, one important difference between
liberalism and Communism regarding the goal itself. Liberals regard as
sacred the right of everyone, however humble, odd, or inarticulate, to
criticize the government, including the man at the top.
Someone might say that many liberals are much too pragmatic to aim
at the universal and homogeneous state: they would be fully satisfied with
a federation of all now existing or soon emerging states, with a truly
universal and greatly strengthened United Nations organization—an orga¬
nization that would include Communist China, the Federal Republic of
Germany, and Communist East Germany, although not necessarily Na¬
tionalist China. Still, this would mean that liberals aim at the greatest
possible approximation to the universal and homogeneous state or that
they are guided by the ideal of the universal and homogeneous state.
Some of them will object to the term “ideal” on the ground that the uni¬
versal and homogeneous state (or the greatest possible approximation to
it) is a requirement of hardheaded politics: that state has been rendered
necessary by economic and technological progress, which includes the ne¬
cessity of making thermonuclear war impossible for all the future, and by
ever increasing wealth of the advanced countries which are compelled by
sheer self-interest to develop the underdeveloped countries. As regards the
still existing tension between the liberal-democratic and the Communist
countries, liberals believe that this tension will be relaxed and will eventu¬
ally disappear as a consequence of the ever increasing welfarism of the
former and the ever increasing liberalism, due to the overwhelming de¬
mand for consumer goods of all kinds, of the latter.
Conservatives regard the universal and homogeneous state as either
undesirable, though possible, or as both undesirable and impossible. They
do not deny the necessity or desirability of larger political units than what
one may call the typical nation-state. For good or ill, they can indeed no
longer be imperialists. But there is no reason whatever why they should
be opposed to a United Free Europe, for instance. Yet they are likely to
understand such units differently from the liberals. An outstanding Euro¬
pean conservative has spoken of VEurope des patries. Conservatives look
with greater sympathy than liberals on the particular or particularist and
the heterogeneous; at least they are more willing than liberals to respect
and perpetuate a more fundamental diversity than the one ordinarily re¬
spected or taken for granted by liberals and even by Communists, that is,
the diversity regarding language, folk songs, pottery, and the like. Inasmuch
as the universalism in politics is founded on the universalism proceeding
from reason, conservativism is frequently characterized by distrust of reason
or by trust in tradition which as such is necessarily this or that tradition
and hence particular. Conservativism is therefore exposed to criticism that
Preface / i\
is guided by the notion of the unity of truth. Liberals, on the other hand,
especially those who know that their aspirations have their roots in the
Western tradition, are not sufficiently concerned with the fact that that
tradition is ever more being eroded by the very changes in the direction of
One World which they demand or applaud.
We remain closer to the surface by saying that the conservatives’ dis¬
trust of the universal and homogeneous state is rooted in their distrust of
change, in what is polemically called their “stand-patism,” whereas liberals
are more inclined than conservatives to be sanguine regarding change.
Liberals are inclined to believe that on the whole change is change for the
better, or progress. As a matter of fact, liberals frequently call themselves
progressives. Progressivism is indeed a better term than liberalism for the
opposite to conservativism. For if conservativism is, as its name indicates,
aversion to change or distrust of change, its opposite should be identified
with the opposite posture toward change, and not with something substan¬
tive like liberty or liberality.
The difficulty of defining the difference between liberalism and con¬
servativism with the necessary universality is particularly great in the
United States, since this country came into being through a revolution, a
violent change or break with the past. One of the most conservative groups
here calls itself Daughters of the American Revolution. The opposition
between conservativism and liberalism had a clear meaning at the time at
which and in the places in which it arose in these terms. Then and there
the conservatives stood for “throne and altar,” and the liberals stood for
popular sovereignty and the strictly nonpublic (private) character of re¬
ligion. Yet conservativism in this sense is no longer politically important.
The conservativism of our age is identical with what originally was liberal¬
ism, more or less modified by changes in the direction of present-day lib¬
eralism. One could go further and say that much of what goes now by the
name of conservativism has in the last analysis a common root with pres¬
ent-day liberalism and even with Communism. That this is the case would
appear most clearly if one were to go back to the origin of modernity, to
the break with the premodern tradition that took place in the seventeenth
century, or to the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns.
We are reminded of that quarrel immediately by the fact that the
term “liberal” is still used in its premodern sense, especially in the expres¬
sion “liberal education.” Liberal education is not the opposite of con¬
servative education, but of illiberal education. To be liberal in the original
sense means to practice the virtue of liberality. If it is true that all vir¬
tues in their perfection are inseparable from one another, the genuinely
liberal man is identical with the genuinely virtuous man. According to
the now prevailing usage, however, to be liberal means not to be con¬
servative. Hence it is no longer assumed that being liberal is the same as
being virtuous or even that being liberal has anything to do with being
x / Preface
virtuous. Being liberal in the original sense is so little incompatible with

being conservative that generally speaking it goes together with a con¬
servative posture.
Premodern political philosophy, and in particular classical political
philosophy, is liberal in the original sense of the term. It cannot be
simply conservative since it is guided by the awareness that all man
seek by nature, not the ancestral or traditional, but the good. On the
other hand, classical political philosophy opposes to the universal and
homogeneous state a substantive principle. It asserts that the society
natural to man is the city, that is, a closed society that can well be taken
in in one view or that corresponds to man’s natural (macroscopic, not
microscopic or telescopic) power of perception. Less literally and more
importantly, it asserts that every political society that ever has been
or ever will be rests on a particular fundamental opinion which can¬
not be replaced by knowledge and hence is of necessity a particular or
particularist society. This state of things imposes duties on the philoso¬
pher’s public speech or writing which would not be duties if a rational
society were actual or emerging; it thus gives rise to a specific art of
writing.
In earlier publications I have tried to lay bare the fundamental differ¬
ence between classical and modem political philosophy. In the present
volume I adumbrate that difference in the following manners. First
I discuss liberal education and then the question as to the sense in
which classical political philosophy can be called liberal. I next illustrate
the liberalism of premodern thinkers by elucidating some examples of
their art of writing. The most extensive discussion is devoted to Lu¬
cretius’ poem. In that poem, not to say in Epicureanism generally, pre-
modern thought seems to come closer to modern thought than any¬
where else. No premodern writer seems to have been as deeply moved
as Lucretius was by the thought that nothing lovable is eternal or sempi¬
ternal or deathless, or that the eternal is not lovable. Apart from this,
it may suffice here to refer to Kant’s presentation of Epicureanism as
identical with the spirit of modern natural science prior to the subjec¬
tion of that science to the critique of pure reason.
Every observer of present-day liberalism must be struck by the very
frequent “personal union” of liberalism and value-free social science.
One is thus led to wonder whether this union is merely accidental or
whether there is not a necessary connection between value-free social
science and liberalism, although liberalism is not, as goes without say¬
ing, value-free. At any rate, the critical study of present-day social sci¬
ence is no mean part of the critical study of liberalism. The essay entitled
“An Epilogue” deals with this subject.
Not much familiarity with political life is needed in order to see
that it is particularly difficult for a nonorthodox Jew to adopt a critical
Preface / xi
posture toward liberalism. Even Jews who are politically conservative can
be observed to defer to contemporary Jewish “opinion leaders” who can
in no sense be described as politically conservative. This state of things
induces one to raise questions such as these: In what sense or to what
extent is Judaism one of the roots of liberalism? Are Jews compelled by
their heritage or their self-interest to be liberals? Is liberalism necessarily
friendly to Jews and Judaism? Can the liberal state claim to have solved
the Jewish problem? Can any state claim to have solved it? To these
questions I address myself in the two statements that conclude this
volume.
Leo Strauss
Claremont, California

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Preface

Liberalism is understood here and now in contradistinction to conserva¬

virtuous. Being liberal in the original sense is so little incompatible with

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