Inadecuada calificación de las conductas por parte del Ministerio

Strauss believed he found the remedy for Machiavelli’s republicanism in the social contractarianism of Thomas Hobbes, who, like Machiavelli, was a philosopher of peace and an analyst of power.

Hobbes (1588-1679) believed that man in “the state of nature” (outside of society) lived a nasty, short, brutish life, because each person is driven by natural appetites and is in mutual competition for power and prestige. Since all men are endowed with reason, Hobbes said, they would naturally want to leave this violent, competitive world, to live in peace. To achieve this end, they must surrender their right of self-defence and erect a sovereign power to rule over them. Such a sovereign would be the embodiment of peace and order to whom the people would owe absolute obedience. In his seminal 1651 work Leviathan, Hobbes sets out the need for a sovereign in language—albeit slightly archaic—that is virtually indistinguishable from that of Strauss:

hear two orators of equal talents advocate different measures, they do not decide in favour of the best of the two; which proves their ability to discern the truth of what they hear. And if occasionally they are misled in questions of courage or seeming utility, so is a prince also many times misled by his own passions, which are much greater then those of the people.”

Machiavelli, Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius, Book I, Ch. LVIII, in Ibid., pp. 263, 264.

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The final cause, end, or design of men (who naturally love liberty, and dominion over others)… is the foresight of their own preservation, and of a more contented life thereby; that is to say, of getting themselves out from that miserable condition of war which is necessarily consequent, as hath been shown, to the natural passions of men when there is no visible power to keep them in awe, and tie them by fear of punishment to the performance of their covenants…. For the laws of nature, as justice, equity, modesty, mercy, and, in sum, doing to others as we would be done to, of themselves, without the terror of some power to cause them to be observed, are contrary to our natural passions, that carry us to partiality, pride, revenge, and the like. And covenants, without the sword, are but words and of no strength to secure a man at all.

The only way to erect such a common power, as may be able to defend them from the invasion of foreigners, and the injuries of one another, and thereby to secure them in such sort as that by their own industry and by the fruits of the earth they may nourish themselves and live contentedly, is to confer all their power and strength upon one man, or upon one assembly of men, that may reduce all their wills, by plurality of voices, unto one will.

This done, the multitude so united in one person is called a COMMONWEALTH; in Latin, CIVITAS. This is the generation of that great LEVIATHAN, or rather, to speak more reverently, of that mortal god to which we owe, under the immortal God, our peace and defense.24

There is much to admire in Hobbes’s clarity and logic, but his view of society is too mechanistic. In the name of peace, citizens must not only surrender their arms, but also their liberty and right to dissent. As we know today, such absolute obedience to authority is the hallmark of totalitarian regimes. Hobbes’ sovereign-ruled state might very well be peaceful, but it is the kind of peace that democracies abhor. Then, again, Hobbes never pretended to be a democrat.

According to Strauss, Hobbes set philosophy back on course by merging natural law with realism to create the entirely new political doctrine of “natural right:”

What Hobbes attempted to do on the basis of Machiavelli’s fundamental objection to the utopian teaching of the tradition, although in opposition to Machiavelli’s own solution, was to maintain the idea of natural law but to divorce it from the classical idea of man’s perfection.25

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7. Unholy Trinity

Strauss’s justification for this position consists of the following deductive reasoning.

• If natural law is derived from the need for self-preservation, as Machiavelli said, then self-preservation is the root of all justice and morality.

• Morality equals self-preservation, which is fundamental and inalienable.

• Morality, therefore, is a right, not a duty. • All duties are derived from morality.

• Duties are binding only to the extent they do not threaten the morality.

• There are only perfect rights, and no perfect duties.

• Since morality is a right, the function and limits of civil society must be defined according to man’s natural rights, not natural duties.

• The state’s function is to safeguard the natural right (morality) of each citizen.

• The power of the state finds its highest expression here and nowhere else.26

This argument is plainly unsound. For one thing, Machiavelli said nothing about natural law being derived from self-preservation; in fact, he denied the value of any overarching ethos, as we saw above: “The gulf between how one should live and how one does live is so wide that a man who neglects what is actually done for what should be done leans the way to self-destruction rather than self-preservation.”

Second, the conclusion “morality is a right” is a contradiction. Third, the concept of “perfect rights” begs the existence of perfection. Fourth, the link between morality and the function of the state is not proven, and as such the deductive relation between moral right and natural right is baseless.

Strauss gives us a perverse caricature of Machiavelli so that he can manufacture plausibility for an authoritarian doctrine of natural law. On the other hand, he gives us an unrealistically sympathetic view of Hobbes so that he can import authoritarianism into the U.S. democratic tradition:

If we may call liberalism that political doctrine which regards as the fundamental political fact the rights, as distinguished from the duties, of man and which identifies the function of the state with the protection or safeguarding of those rights, we must say that the founder of liberalism was Hobbes.27

As the following two excerpts show, Strauss’s views on the divinely guided natural liberty of men, laissez-faire economics, and defense against foreign invasion are virtually lifted from Leviathan.

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