On June 7, 2007 the opinion page of The New York Times carried a piece by Jenny Strauss Clay, daughter of Leo Strauss. With a candid fervor, she sought to distance her father’s legacy from the masterminds of the neo-conservative ideologues of the American foreign policy. She tells us that Leo Strauss believed in the intrinsic dignity of the political. He believed in and defended liberal democracy; although he was not blind to its flaws. He was an enemy of any regime that aspired to global domination. He despised unworked utopianism—in our time, Nazism and Communism—which is predicated on the denial of a fundamental and even noble feature of human nature: love of one’s own deepest concerns. And yes, Jenny Strauss reminds us that his greatest passions were to raise rabbits (Flemish Giants) and read Plato with his students.

The nephew of Wassily Kandinsky, Alexandre Kojeve/ Kozhevnikov’s seminars on Hegel from 1933-1939 at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, as is well known, fundamentally influenced much of modern French thought, including that of Merleau-Ponty and Lacan, Bataille and Althusser, Breton and Queneau—all his students at some point. Kojeve’s thought also philosophically encouraged a different breed of social and political thinkers: Raymond Aron in France, Alan Bloom and Francis Fukuyama in the US, to name a select few. Kojeve himself spent the final 25 years of his life as a trade negotiator and civil servant under de Gaulle and helped establish the European Economic Community (now EU) as a model for his universal and homogenous state.

What then is the relationship between a teacher of classics and one of the prime usherers of postmodern tendencies in social sciences?  And how does such tendencies relate to pragmatic libertarian strains, professing diametrically opposed views?  How does old Europe—the ancien regime—find a timely ally and contender in a variant of the dark romanticist in order to cry with might and main against matter and perception, challenging the practitioners of history and human endeavor in general?

A very intimate and crucial window on such issues opens up through a fortuitous series of exchanges between Strauss and Kojeve in the wake of Strauss’s exposition of one of Xenophon’s short dialogues between Heiro, tyrant of Syracuse, and Simonides of Ceos, poet-businessman-sophist-perhaps wise man. Strauss’s original study appeared in 1948, and the French edition, with Kojeve’s review essay and Strauss’s restatement, in 1954. Later Victor Gourevitch and Michael Roth collated all the extant letters between the two written between 1932 and 1965, many of which carries on and extend the exchanges on Xenophon.

Xenophon’s Heiro or Tyrannicus is a dialogue. So, the authorial voice can afford to remain elusive and that is one basis for the interpretive differences that arise. Besides, it necessitates the confrontation of a wise man (the teacher) and a ruler (the pupil). Or are the roles reversed? Simonides has traveled to Heiro’s city, seeking the tyrant’s presumed wisdom and asks which is better: the life of the tyrant or private man. Heiro has experienced both and hence ought to have a superior knowledge of the issue. He responds through a litany of despondency that indeed tyrants have fewer pleasures and greater pain than private persons. Most of all, sweet pleasures of pederasty are denied to a tyrant:

“But in the pleasures of sex with boys the tyrant comes off still much worse than in those with women for begetting offspring. For I presume we all know these pleasures of sex give much greater enjoyment when accompanied with love. But love in turn is least of all willing to arise in a tyrant, for love takes pleasure in longing not for what is at hand, but what is hoped for…to take pleasure in the pain of whomever one loves, to kiss and be hated, to touch and be loathed—must not these be distressing and pitiful affliction?…the private man knows his beloved serves under no compulsion. But it is never possible for the tyrant to trust that he is loved.”

More importantly, tyrants, Heiro explains, fear the brave, the just and the wise, and owing to this fear, they cannot enjoy the company of such virtuous souls. They fear the brave because they might dare something for the sake of freedom; the just because the multitude might desire to be ruled by them and the wise because they might contrive something unknown. The wise, most of all, is mistrusted because they possess some valued good, indefinite, yet subversive of civic life and religious piety. There is a disproportion between this intransigent quest for wisdom (the mistrust of the theoretical types) and the requirements of society, Strauss reminds us in his initial commentary.

The peripetei—reversal—happens at that point. Simonides, so far engaged in a baiting game with Heiro, takes charge in the second half and offers advice. He counsels Heiro to worry more about honour than love and shows him some simple and obvious means to encourage admiration instead of fearful compliance. The hateful aspects of tyranny are not to be annihilated, because they cannot be. They must be banished from sight instead. For instance, the tyrant must award prizes, but entrust others with inflicting of punishment. Moreover, tyrants should not compete with private men, but with other leaders, win those contests and thus gain the admiration of their subjects. Simonides appears to praise highly beneficent tyranny, though not without a touch of irony.

I

Strauss opens up his commentary on a scathing note: “…when we were brought to face to face with tyranny—with a kind of tyranny that surpassed the boldest imagination of the most powerful thinkers of the past—our political science failed to recognize it.” Xenophon, he argues, is not a democrat, and that the dialogue underlines the necessity of cultivating a certain kind of virtue as opposed to modernist values like freedom. The wise are simply not concerned about freedom or ought not to be. And virtue possibly under a tyrant will have a different colour from that of its republican counterpart.  Not courage among the subjects, but moderation produced by fear, is the virtue professed by Simonides, and it is no way inferior in dignity to republican virtue. A just and virtuous man is the one who does not hurt anyone, but helps in dealings beneficial to the city. Likewise, a good ruler (by the end of the dialogue tyrant has become ruler) is likely to be beneficent whereas legal or senatorial justice may be blind. Tyranny then may live up to the highest political standard, not democracy or citizenship values. Strauss is certain that Xenophon pitches for one, and only one, sufficient title to rule: knowledge, and not force or fraud, election or inheritance. Hiero, at the bottom, being a citizen himself, cannot but indict tyranny, and hence is pussyfooting. Simonides, as a stranger/mercenary to the polis, does not have any such loyalty issues and hence is free to underline the wisdom of beneficent tyranny as a political principle.

A few markers take significant hue here. Strauss implies that though the dialogue is not a blueprint for action, it does intend to present us with two contrasting ways of life: the political life and the life devoted to wisdom. And since Simonides rules the ruler and Hiero sits silent at the end, it indicates the superiority of wisdom. Admiration, contra love, as Simonides proposes to Heiro as a political end, must lead to a concern for cultivating that-for-which one-is honoured. And that is some kind of piety or transpolitical justice. Justice is the preserve of those who have the greatest self-sufficiency humanly possible. Ordinary men strive for love from fellow humans; wise seek admiration from the select—from those who are free in the highest degree. This line of thought implies: (1) That there can be better or worse regimes but no perfected political life, since the rule of wise will never materialize as the wise will never reconcile with the non-wise. So the fundamental political distinction of few-many remains. (2) Philosophers should attend to politics, but only to make it safe for themselves. Hence, they ought to practice moderation, and not be subversive adventurers like Socrates. (3) Since the wise man alone is free, he is autonomous, lives subjectively and does not require cooperation. (4) Philosophy is an awareness of fundamental problems and an awareness how little is possible to solve those, as Simonides’ final radically zetetic and utopian points to Heiro testify.

II

In his review piece first published in Critique in 1950 (titled Tyranny and Wisdom) and in several letters, Kojeve brushes aside these assertions and proposes a radical substitute. Neutrality of wisdom does not impress Kojeve. Rather, a proper account of historical agency and free act as an expression of some fundamental dissatisfaction is primary concern to a Hegelian. Struggle and willingness to take risk in order to win is consequently not exactly an eternal concern, as Simonides/Strauss will have us believe. It is very much part of a lived reality.

Here Kojeve makes the evident point that since Hiero never responds to Simonides’ advice at the end, there is little indication that the tyrant is persuaded by any utopian faith in wisdom. The idea of eternal truth, so conducive to a laidback aristocratic worldview is rather an intellectual sophistry, not wisdom.  The end of a tyrant’s world, especially if it has to have cotemporary significance, is not motivated by honour/love but by recognition by the citizens. Hiero is not fully satisfied not because he has no authority, but because his authority is recognized by some and not by all of those whom he himself considers to be citizens. Kojeve offers instead the notion of bourgeois work and labour ‘correcting’ the pagan worldview. The success of a theoretically enlightened tyranny depends on historical and social conditions, not on detached awareness of admiration. A fine instance of a modern actualization of such an ideal tyranny would be Portugal’s Salazar, Kojeve famously puts it.

As opposed to Strauss’s theistic, self-certifying recipes of renunciation, Kojeve proposes Hegel’s atheism, whereby being is temporal, revealed in the course of history. Strauss’s natural order tracing it back to piety is recipe for a cloistered and sectarian society, insulated from the rest of society, perpetuating prejudice he feels. Instead, free mutual recognition of the statesman and the thinker leads towards some unified terme finale—avoiding the tyrant/private-man break up, without the master/slave division. Besides, for Kojeve, history has already ended, reached such a finale with the French Revolution, something that would be beyond Xenophon’s reach. The rest is a matter of bourgeois post-historical completion amidst abundance and complete security: “ Men would construct their edifices and works of art as birds build their nests and spiders spin their webs, would perform their musical concerts in the manner of frogs and cicadas, would play like young animals, and would indulge in love like adult beasts.” The story of the end of history is a radical rejection of a philosophy of nature, of classical political rationalism.

Strauss, of course, is hardly convinced by such lax morality, by any willingness to be satisfied at the vulgar level of universal and equal satisfaction of the adult beast. He responds in one of his notes, rallying against such anthropological reading of history: “Warriors and workers of all countries, unite, while there is still time, to prevent the coming of the realm of freedom.” Clearly, for Strauss, Kojeve’s young animals will be always ‘potentially’ satisfied and tyrants must force people to be free. At best, one can say that as rational individuals there will be no rational basis for dissatisfaction at the end of history. Once satisfied, they could doze off to a permanent cultural sleep. Strauss prefers to hold steadfast to Simonides’ advice of cultural moderation till the end.

The correspondences are a masterly study in classical perfectionism and melancholic left-fascism during the first half of the previous century, preparing ground for the influential future generations of the wise and policy makers alike, in spite of Jenny Strauss’ ardent wishes. What comes out interestingly in these rare exchanges are the remarkably divergent approaches setting apart these two arch romantics. Both distrusted the relativistic strains of modernity, civic politics, urbane art and mass democracy. Yet one looks at the past for reassurance, the other at the future. One seeks refuge in cosmos, the other in the spirit. One puts his faith in the immoderation of Pericles’ funereal oration, the other in the flight of the owl of Minerva.