Fukuyama Gets Strauss Wrong

Francis Fukuyama lacks self-knowledge. On June 4, he republished excerpts from Leo Strauss’s 1941 lecture on “German Nihilism.” In the introductory paragraphs, Fukuyama characterizes aspects of Strauss’s warnings to the liberal culture of the modern West. But he cannot bring himself to articulate what Strauss clearly implies: Only an education that risks illiberal loves and loyalties can sustain a liberal culture. Perhaps that’s because Fukuyama, like the liberal German professors Strauss criticizes, is too busy policing our political imaginations, tut-tutting about “irresponsible” and “extreme” postliberals.

Strauss begins with National Socialism. The great German-Jewish scholar described this political-cultural movement as the “lowest, most provincial, most unenlightened and most dishonourable form” of a larger phenomenon, the desire to annihilate (hence “nihilism”) modern civilization. But it gained traction because it spoke to something less low, less provincial, less unenlightened, and less dishonorable.

Immersed in German intellectual culture throughout the 1920s, Strauss was in close contact with the ferment of Weimar Germany. He recognized that some German intellectuals, especially students and young scholars, were disgusted by what they believed to be the spiritually empty promise of a liberal and “open” society, a world of mere utility, procedures, and nominal freedoms that breeds a “lack of seriousness.” 

This judgment against the perceived bloodlessness of Weimar liberalism bred an angry radicalism—“the desire to destroy the present world and its potentialities.” Fukuyama urges us to fix on this dangerous and destructive impulse, which he suggests is now alive “in America today on the extreme right.”

But this focus was not Strauss’s. He wished to warn his American auditors. Pre-war German nihilism and its desire to smash the status quo amounted to a moral protest (Strauss is emphatic on this score). “The prospect of a pacified planet, without rulers and ruled, of a planetary society devoted to production and consumption only, to the production and consumption of spiritual as well as material merchandise, was positively horrifying to quite a few very intelligent and very decent, if very young, Germans.” 

The moral protest was not unwarranted, Strauss suggests. The problem rested in the intellectual culture of Weimar Germany (and perhaps the modern West as a whole). “The adolescents I am speaking of were in need of teachers who could explain to them in articulate language the positive, and not merely destructive, meaning of their aspirations.” 

But this was not forthcoming. As Strauss reports, teachers in Germany were in one way or another modern themselves. They discoursed about historical contexts and taught technical subjects. In a word, education was anti-metaphysical, which is to say “progressive,” as Strauss calls it. Rather than taking the moral protest seriously, professors were satisfied to point out the juvenile nature of its destructive impulse, or the incoherence of various “postliberal” proposals of the time—as does Fukuyama, who, like so many others today, often says that the grave error of those who criticize liberalism rests in the fact that they are not liberal. These purported refutations amounted (as Strauss put it) to “repetitions of things which the young people knew already by heart.” The same is true today.

Therein lay disaster. “[The nihilistic students] rather needed old-fashioned teachers.” They needed to feel the demands of those who spoke with an authority born of devotion to a tradition of truth that has deep roots. The antidote to nihilism is not an enumeration of warnings about intolerance and “authoritarianism.” It’s to be found in metaphysical weight, as it were, the power to compel minds and inspire love’s mania: the desire to serve the beloved, even to sacrifice oneself.

Reason is cool. It analyzes, weighs, and judges. Strauss was a great patron of reason. He regarded it as the foundation of civilization, which he described as “the conscious culture of reason.” Modern civilization raises this principle to the highest level, engendering the universalism characteristic of the modern West—scientific-technocratic management, the rule of law, and human rights. But Strauss knew that this achievement must be leavened by pre-modern sources and traditions if it is to endure. 

Strauss ends his lecture with an encomium to English elites. Yes, they were the great theorists of modern liberalism in the nineteenth century, and with their vast imperial power, they spread it widely. But “while the English originated the modern ideal, the pre-modern ideal, the classical ideal of humanity, was nowhere better preserved than in Oxford and Cambridge.”

Today, the pre-modern ideal is nowhere to be found in our universities. It is denounced as “patriarchal,” or somehow shown to be dependent on slavery or some other form of unjust dominion. Forced to subsist on the platitudes of the “open society,” young people are deprived of any vocabulary of transcendence. 

Fukuyama ends his introduction: “Strauss’ point is that liberals needed to understand much better the deeper roots of illiberal politics, and to look beyond the horizon defined by liberalism to see the power of the critiques of their doctrine.” This is a half-truth. The full truth is that Strauss believed that a liberal culture needs to cultivate illiberal voices within itself—the authority of human nature, for example, and the authority of God.

Of course, those voices are presently silenced in our universities. Has Francis Fukuyama ever spent any political capital defending them? If not, then he’s part of the problem Strauss warned us about.