Review: “The Struggle for a Decent Politics: On ‘Liberal’ as an Adjective” by Michael Walzer

“Reading between the lines, we learn in fact that [Michael] Walzer believes that the Right, wrong in its continuing adherence to capitalism, but correct in its eschewal of intellectual fashion, currently has a monopoly on political wisdom.”

In an article published in 1941, the political philosopher Leo Strauss invited his audience to imagine a historian living in a totalitarian country. A “generally respected and unsuspected member of the only party in existence,” he is led “by his investigations to doubt the government-sponsored interpretation of the history of religion.” Naturally, to dissent from the party line would draw the wrath of the authorities. Demurral would eventuate in loss of livelihood, or even loss of life. If one is a diligent researcher committed to expounding the truth, how, then, should he proceed? According to Strauss, the historian would proceed as follows.

Firstly, nobody would prevent our historian from publishing “a passionate attack on what he would call the liberal view.” Of course, before attacking it he would have to state it first. Making that statement, he would write in the “quiet, unspectacular and somewhat boring manner which would seem to be but natural.” However, having reached the core of the argument, he would write three or four sentences in a “terse and lively style.” Our historian would exposit, in one passage alone, “the case of the adversaries, more clearly, compellingly and mercilessly than it had ever been stated in the very heyday of liberalism.” The reasonable young reader would, thus, for the first time, “catch a glimpse of the forbidden fruit.” Newly aware of the historian’s esoteric strategy, our intelligent young reader would now sense the author’s veiled irony when he discusses the books of the ruling party, and, reading the book again, he would detect “in the very arrangement of the quotations from the authoritative books significant additions to those few terse statements.” The reader, in other words, would, with difficulty, gain access to the historian’s actual views, as opposed to the state-sanctioned orthodoxy.

Strauss argued that persecution “gives rise to a peculiar technique of writing, and therewith to a peculiar type of literature, in which the truth about all crucial things is presented exclusively between the lines.” Esoteric writing, Strauss claimed, “has all the advantages of private communication without having its greatest disadvantage—that it reaches only personal acquaintances.” Meanwhile, it “has all the advantages of public communication without having its greatest disadvantage—capital punishment for the author.”