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Soc (2014) 51:704707DOI 10.1007/s12115-014-9845-3
BOOK REVIEW
Grant N. Havers, Leo Strauss and Anglo-American Democracy: A Conservative Critique
DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2013. 262pp. $37.00. ISBN: 978-0875804781
David Lewis Schaefer
Published online: 16 September 2014# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014
AbstractGrant Havers's Leo Straus and Anglo-American Democracy: A Conservative Critique seriously misrepresents Strauss's thought, largely as a result of Havers's determination to use the history of political philosophy for partisan purposes of his own, unlike Strauss's determined and meticulous effort to learn fromthe greatest philosophic writers both ancient and modern.
Keywords Strauss . Political philosophy . Havers . Christianity . Natural rights
This critique of the teachings of the great twentieth-century political philosopher Leo Strauss wears its partisan heart on its sleeve from the subtitle on. In contrast to the numerous critics of Strauss and Straussians from the political Left, Havers, a Canadian academic and professed conservative Protestant, regards Strauss as a sincere friend of liberal democracy, but complains that his opposition to leftism was far from uniform. He aims to provide a critical analysis of the reasoning underlying Strausss support for Anglo-American democracy, lamenting that Strauss and his students largely agree with the traditional leftist dismissal of Christianity as an irrational influence on the political philosophy of the West, thus failing to appreciate that Protestantism deserves far more credit for the philosophy of natural rights on which the United States was founded than does the classical thought that he believes underlay Strausss support for our regime.
There are troubling or confusing elements to Haverss argument from the outset. One is his insistence that because
Strauss was centrally concerned with the theme of Athens and Jerusalem and aimed at the recovery of the classical philosophic tradition, this means that Strauss must have aimed at a restoration of something like classical political life, despite the turbulence and demagoguery that characterized the Greek cities. To reach this conclusion, Havers must continually misread the texts. For instance, just after citing a 1946 letter in which Strauss warns against confusing philosophers like Plato and Aristotle with the Greek man in the street, Havers insists that Strauss was unable to consistently uph [o] ld this distinction between Greek political thought and the Greek city-state, since it is...