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Strauss starts his lecture with the famous passage from the Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Strauss considers the dedication of Americans to this proposition as one of the cardinal reasons for their power and prosperity. However, as he observes, Americans do not cherish the faith in these words anymore. If a generation ago “the natural and the divine foundation of the rights of man” was self-evident to all Americans, today the very notion of “natural right” has become almost incomprehensible. Hence, the principles of the Declaration of Independence are not interpreted as expressions of natural right, but merely as an ideal, if not as an ideology or a myth.

Strauss traces this phenomenon to Present-day American social sciences, which have adopted the very attitude towards natural rights characteristic to German thought. More precisely, its “historical sense”. Strauss remarks that Germany, although defeated on the battlefield, “has imposed on its conqueror i.e. America the yoke of its own thought, depriving it of the most sublime fruit of victory” (Strauss 1971, 2).

Before discussing the very essence of the “historicist” attitude towards the problem of natural rights, first of all, let us give a comprehensive definition of natural right per se. “natural right claims to be a right that is discernible by human reason and is universally acknowledged” (Strauss 1971, 9). In its classic form, it presupposes a teleological view of the universe. According to which “all natural beings have a natural end, a natural destiny, which determines what kind of operation is good for them” (Strauss 1971, 7). And since “man is endowed with reason he can know his end and thus of the general principles that govern his conduct. Principles that constitute a “law”, promulgated by nature itself, which enables him to discriminate between right and wrong” (Fortin 1987, 281).

In opposition, the historical school of thought that emerged in 18 century Germany believed that no such universal rights existed. Instead of insisting on the ethnic character of all genuine rights, it trailed all natural rights to unique folk minds. In other words, according to historicism, what claimed to be universal appeared eventually as derivative from something locally and temporally confined. As Strauss himself puts it: “radicalizing the tendency of men like Rousseau, the historical school asserted that the local and the temporal have a higher value than the universal” (Strauss 1971, 14). In this manner, historicism does not deny the notion of natural right all at once, as does for example positivism – another powerful enemy of natural right alongside historicism. Instead, historicism had preserved natural right, only in a historical guise: on the one hand, 1) by assuming history as a process ruled by intelligible necessity i.e. trans-historical principle, and on the other hand, 2) by reducing universality of genuine rights to individual cultures i.e. folk minds.

According to Strauss, the historical school of thoughts with its aforementioned tendencies “emerged in reaction to the French Revolution and to the natural right doctrines that had prepared that cataclysm” (Strauss 1971, 13). Founders of the historical school somehow assumed that the acceptance of any universal or abstract principles has necessarily a revolutionary, disturbing, unsettling effect similar to the French Revolution. Thus In opposing the violent break with the past, the historical school insisted on the wisdom and on the need of preserving or continuing the traditional order. According to the historical school, “the recognition of universal principles such as natural rights tends to alienate men from their place on the earth, making them strangers in their social order, and even strangers on the earth” (Strauss 1971, 13). Recognizing this historicism intended to make men absolutely at home in “this world.”

“Since any universal principles make at least most men potentially homeless, historicism depreciated universal principles in favor of historical principles. It believed that, by understanding their past, their heritage, their historical situation, men could arrive at principles that would be as objective as those of the older, pre-historicist political philosophy had claimed to be and, in addition, would not be abstract or universal and hence harmful to wise action or to a truly human life, but concrete or particular—principles fitting the particular age or particular nation, principles relative to the particular age or particular nation” (Strauss 1971, 16).

Hence for historical school historical studies became the mainspring of knowledge. For history was thought to supply the only empirical, and hence the only solid, knowledge of what is truly human, of man as a man: of his greatness and misery. In other words, establishing his end divorced from all dubious or metaphysical assumptions.

However, as Strauss puts it, “history proved utterly unable to keep the promise that had been held out by the historical school” (Strauss 1971, 17). This was evident already from the contradiction between the basic premises of the historicist paradigm. On the one hand, 1) by perceiving nations or ethnic groups as natural units, as independent organisms, historicism encloses nations in their own cultural and historical boundaries, making the existence of transcultural and trans-historical principles impossible. Yet, on the other hand, 2) by claiming to have discovered the existence of general laws of historical evolution, historicism recognizes the transcultural and trans-historical principles that govern the historical process. Moreover, any sincere member of the historicist school of thought must admit that his view too is as temporary, local, and ephemeral as any other paradigm that has been replaced before.

Hence historicism not only relativizes universal truth but also makes truth inaccessible to man as man; “it asserts that the basic insight into the essential limitation of all human thought is not accessible to man as a man or it is an unforeseeable gift of unfathomable fate” (Strauss 1971, 28).

“According to the ancient and medieval philosophy – Strauss says - the whole is knowable or intelligible, which presupposes that the whole has a permanent structure or that the whole is unchangeable. In contradistinction, according to historicism, what is called the whole is actually always incomplete and therefore not truly a whole; the whole is essentially changing in such a manner that its future cannot be predicted; the whole as it is in itself can never be grasped” (Strauss 1971, 30).

Consequently, it is no surprise that historicism ends up denying the natural right. Since without the accessibility of truth and the whole, the notion of natural right falls apart. Thus, in the face of a valueless universe, historicism’s last hope lies in the absolute moment of history, when the ultimate truth is revealed. But the irony of historicism consists in the fact that the absolute moment is nothing but “the moment in which the insoluble character of the fundamental riddles has become fully manifest or in which the fundamental delusion of the human mind has been dispelled” (Strauss 1971, 29); the moment in which Historicism culminates in nihilism.

As Strauss puts it: “the attempt to make man absolutely at home in this world ended in man’s becoming absolutely homeless” (Strauss 1971, 18). Historicism has revealed nothing but absolute meaninglessness of “the historical process”; that history is merely a tale told by an idiot.

However, surprisingly enough, despite all its consequences historicism did not lose its prestige. The mood created by historicism and its practical failure was interpreted as the authentic experience of the true situation of man as man—of a situation which earlier man had concealed from himself by believing in universal and unchangeable principles. The nihilistic consequence of historicism could have suggested a return to the older, pre-historicist view. According to, which classical notion of natural rights reign. Nevertheless, modern intellectual trends in social sciences hold enough proof that the historicist strand has only become more powerful in the West.

References

Strauss, L. (1953). Natural right and history. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Strauss, L., & Cropsey, J. (1987). History of political philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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