Fall 2015

Volume 42 Issue 1 

Fall 2015 

3 

31 

51 

69 

Stephen A. Block & 

Patrick Cain 

Kazutaka Kondo 

Michael Millerman 

Quentin Taylor 

Socrates’s Spirited Defense of Knowledge: Continence, Incontinence, 

and Human Action in Book VII of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics 

Reputation and Virtue: The Rhetorical Achievement of Socrates 

in Xenophon’s Apology 

On “The Literary Character of the Guide for the Perplexed”: 

Aporia and Euporia 

The Spirit of the Age: J. S. Mill’s Radical Manifesto 

95 

99 

115 

129 

135 

141 

147 

153 

157 

Joseph Alulis 

Jeffrey A. Bernstein 

Steven Frankel 

Book Reviews: 

Thucydides and the Pursuit of Freedom by Mary P. Nichols 

Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writings 

by Arthur M. Melzer 

Leo Strauss: On the Borders of Judaism, Philosophy, and History 

by Jeffrey Bernstein; Leo Strauss on Maimonides: The Complete Writings, 

edited by Kenneth Hart Green; Leo Strauss and the Rediscovery of 

Maimonides by Kenneth Hart Green 

Gregory A. McBrayer Redeeming the Prince: The Meaning of Machiavelli’s Masterpiece 

by Maurizio Viroli 

Susan McWilliams 

Frank N. Pagano 

Leo Strauss’s Defense of the Philosophic Life: Reading “What Is Political 

Philosophy?,” edited by Rafael Major 

A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful, edited by Paul Guyer 

David Lewis Schaefer In Search of Humanity: Essays in Honor of Clifford Orwin, 

edited by Andrea Radasanu 

Thomas E. Schneider Democracy in Decline: Steps in the Wrong Direction by James Allan 

Stephen Sims 

Sovereignty: The Origin and Future of a Political and Legal Concept 

by Dieter Grimm 

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be reproduced in any form without written permission of the publisher. 

ISSN 0020-9635

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Les Harris 

Sarah Teutschel 

Interpretation, A Journal of Political Philosophy 

Department of Political Science 

Baylor University 

1 Bear Place, 97276 

Waco, TX 76798 

interpretation@baylor.edu

Socrates’s Spirited Defense of Knowledge 

3 

Socrates’s Spirited Defense of Knowledge: 

Continence, Incontinence, and Human Action in 

Book VII of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics 

St e p h e n A . B l o c k 


steve_block@baylor.edu 

Pat r ic k C a i n 

Lakehead University, Ontario 

pncain@lakeheadu.ca 

Abstract: In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle provides the most famous account of moral 

virtue ever offered by a philosopher, but one that proves perplexing, not least because this 

account culminates in a depreciation of human virtue in Book VI. In light of this background, 

this essay provides a new interpretation of Aristotle’s analysis in Book VII of the 

Ethics of the Socratic claim that no one “knowingly acts contrary to what is best.” The authors 

contend that Aristotle shows that Socrates’s thesis affirming the mastery of knowledge originates 

in a quest, rooted in spiritedness, to divinize the soul and transcend the limitations 

of mere human virtue. Accordingly, the essay links Aristotle’s analysis of continence and 

incontinence to the problem of the relation between the human and the divine with which 

Aristotle introduces and concludes Book VII, as well as Aristotle’s largely ignored account of 

spiritedness (thumos) in Book VII. 

In the first six books of Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle provides the most 

important account of moral virtue ever offered by a philosopher. This “treatise 

on virtue” nevertheless proves perplexing, above all because this account 

culminates in a depreciation of moral virtue and the human things in general 

at the conclusion of his discussion of virtue in Book VI, after which 

© 2015 Interpretation, Inc.

4 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 42 / Issue 1 

Aristotle claims to begin anew with a discussion of new moral characteristics 

distinct from virtue. In light of this background, our essay provides a new 

interpretation of what immediately follows in the first half of Book VII of the 

Ethics, and specifically the Socratic claim raised and analyzed by Aristotle 

that no one knowingly acts contrary to what is best. We contend that Aristotle 

shows that Socrates’s thesis affirming the mastery of knowledge in the 

continent originates in a quest, rooted in spiritedness, to divinize the soul 

and transcend the limitations of merely human virtue. As such, contrary to 

the view presented in most interpretations of Aristotle’s work, continence 

appears not as an inferior form of moral virtue, but as a higher although 

problematic alternative to moral virtue. Accordingly, the essay links the 

analysis of incontinence to the problem of the relation between the human 

and the divine with which Aristotle introduces and concludes Book VII, and 

to Aristotle’s largely ignored account of spiritedness (thumos) in Book VII. 

At the opening of Book VII, Aristotle announces a new beginning to the 

inquiry into the good that Aristotle had taken up in the Ethics, first with an 

analysis of happiness (Book I), and then with a detailed accounting of virtue, 

both moral (Books II–V) and intellectual (Book VI). What is most evidently 

new about Book VII is the emergence of continence (enkrateia), which first 

appears as a kind of halfway house on the road to virtue. Whereas moral 

virtue entailed a harmonization of the soul’s desires with what is best and 

proper through habituation (and vice the opposite: 1119a1–20), 1 Aristotle’s 

discussion of continence and incontinence seems to acknowledge the experience 

most human beings struggle with: namely, that our desire for pleasure 

does battle with—and sometimes even overcomes—what we know to be best. 

In this, the new concern with continence and incontinence first appears as 

a concern with what is lower than virtue, for even if continence is achieved 

through the successful resistance of the desire for pleasure, the battle in the 

soul that it seems to involve makes it a lower form of goodness than that 

achieved by moral virtue. According to Tessitore, for instance, Book VII is a 

decline from the heights of moral virtue to the lower, more accessible target 

of continence. 2 In a similar vein, Burger argues that the discussion in Book 

1 

All references to the Nicomachean Ethics are in parentheses. The translations are our own, but we 

have consulted the translations of Bartlett and Collins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011) 

and Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926). 

2 

Aristide Tessitore, Reading Aristotle’s “Ethics”: Virtue, Rhetoric, and Political Philosophy (Albany: 

State University of New York Press, 1996), 52. See also Thomas W. Smith, Revaluing Ethics: Aristotle’s 

Dialectical Pedagogy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 180; and Lorraine Smith 

Pangle, “Virtue and Self-Control in Xenophon’s Socratic Thought,” in Natural Right and Political 

Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Catherine Zuckert and Michael Zuckert, ed. Ann Ward and Lee Ward 

(South Bend, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2013), 16.


5 

VII descends from the higher peak of philosophy that it achieved in Book 

VI in a way that reminds the reader of the philosopher’s return to the cave 

in Book VII of Plato’s Republic. 3 One might be tempted to understand Book 

VII, then, as fulfilling the practical goal of the Ethics that its listeners become 

good; continence would seem to be a step on the way to moral virtue in its 

fullest form, and thus an incomplete form of virtue. 

On the other hand, much of Aristotle’s discussion of continence and 

incontinence is devoted to the examination of the Socratic paradox that no 

one with knowledge will act contrary to that knowledge, or that incontinence 

is an illusion and does not really exist. Socrates’s position thus described 

makes correct action dependent on knowledge alone, with that knowledge 

providing the very thing that was lacking from the previous account of moral 

virtue. On this basis, continence would entail a kind of science of action, a 

knowledge from which right behavior could be fully derived. Virtue—newly 

understood as continence—would become knowledge and, as we shall see, 

would provide the very thing lacking from Aristotle’s previous account of 

moral virtue, which was crucially dependent on the incorporation of the passions 

into the virtuous characteristics. In this way, continence appears to be 

a kind of peak beyond even the heights reached by moral virtue, for it holds 

out the possibility of taking fuller control of our lives than what was available 

within the life of moral virtue. 

It is noteworthy that the same scholars who perceive a lowering of concern 

in Book VII also present Aristotle’s analysis as indicating his agreement 

with the Socratic thesis and its implication that incontinence does not really 

exist. 4 On this reading, although incontinence is experienced as the rule of 

desire over what we hold to be best, a closer examination reveals that its victory 

is really over “false” knowledge, or ignorance, or mere opinion, and not 

genuine knowledge. This denial of the existence of incontinence and the subsequent 

affirmation of continence is, in one sense, an optimistic interpretation 

3 

Ronna Burger, Aristotle’s Dialogue with Socrates (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 132. 

4 

Tessitore, Reading Aristotle’s “Ethics,” 56–57, defends the Socratic position by reading Aristotle to 

mean that the apparently incontinent person acts against potential rather than actual knowledge. 

Burger, Aristotle’s Dialogue with Socrates, 138, 142, 151, also has Aristotle affirming the Socratic 

position, and says Aristotle views apparent instances of incontinence as really kinds of temporary 

ignorance caused by madness or drunkenness or sleep. See also David L. Schaefer, “Wisdom and 

Morality: Aristotle’s Account of Akrasia,” Polity 21 (1998): 245–247; and Leah Bradshaw, “Political 

Rule, Prudence and the Woman Question in Aristotle,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 24 

(1991): 564–66. Whereas this scholarship for the most part understands the knowledge at stake to be 

prudential, our reading highlights the importance of scientific knowledge to Aristotle’s account, and 

the importance of distinguishing it from prudence.


of the possibility of rationality achieving victory over the irrational or subrational. 

On the other hand it would also seem to mean that we are not morally 

responsible for our failings in the way that we often believe ourselves to be. 

Aristotle’s putative agreement with Socrates would seem not only to further 

the depreciation of moral virtue, but also and more importantly to replace 

moral virtue with a new kind of virtue, governed by knowledge. This new virtue 

promises to be the source of right and good action, thereby pointing to an 

intellectual life that is superior to and distinct from the life of moral virtue. 

The analysis provided in our essay takes a different approach. While we 

too think that Aristotle affirms the Socratic thesis as having these implications 

for incontinence, we also think that Aristotle’s argument contains a 

subtle questioning of continence itself; his discussion offers little reason to 

think that continence can be achieved or that it is good. Aristotle shows that a 

continence that is superior or identical to virtue would require the possession 

of a scientific knowledge (epistēmē). This scientific knowledge would allow for 

continence insofar as “we all suppose that what we know scientifically does 

not admit of being otherwise” (1139b20). And if such a precise knowledge is 

possible, then it could become the foundation of right human action, for it 

could perfect the formerly less than exacting judgment of moral virtue under 

the guidance of prudence. 5 It is therefore fitting that Aristotle begins and 

ends his presentation of continence and incontinence with a discussion of 

the place of the human in relation to the divine, for if a scientific knowledge 

of human action could be achieved, then it might even provide the grounds 

for human action to reach completion in a way that permits it to become an 

object of contemplation. 

We will show, however, that although Aristotle’s analysis of the Socratic 

thesis means to raise these possibilities, it is ultimately designed to demonstrate 

the difficulty of human beings achieving this scientific knowledge, or of 

using it to direct their actions. In other words, while we agree that his account 

of incontinence sides with the Socratic position insofar as it shows the impossibility 

of acting against scientific knowledge, we argue that his analysis 

also suggests the need to question the continence that that same scientific 

knowledge would require. Aristotle shows the need to question not only 

incontinence, but also the possibility of continence, and therefore to wonder 

whether our desire to bind science to human action is good. Underscoring and 

5 

Schaefer writes: “The start of Book VII entails not only a consideration of moral possibilities other 

than virtue and vice, but also a reconsideration of moral virtue itself, taking into account its newly 

articulated connection with prudence” (“Wisdom and Morality,” 225).


7 

illuminating this criticism, we argue, is Aristotle’s consideration of the relationship 

between spiritedness (thumos) and reason as it appears in his often 

overlooked account of spirited incontinence which follows his analysis of the 

Socratic thesis. This feature of Aristotle’s argument, we suggest, furthers his 

uncovering of both our desire for a science of action and the implications of 

our attempt to attain it. Aristotle means to disclose what an exacting or scientific 

knowledge of action would need, and what it would entail. 

If we are right that continence undermines the integrity of moral virtue, 

Aristotle’s questioning of the authority of scientific knowledge might leave a 

place for prudence, and therefore moral virtue, in the best human life. Book 

VII can thus be understood as Aristotle’s attempt to moderate the quest to 

be divine at the expense of our humanity. We believe that this analysis helps 

uncover the light Book VII sheds on Aristotle’s answer to the ultimate question 

of the Ethics: What is the good that is appropriate to us as human beings? 

Book VII in Context 

Aristotle introduces the Nicomachean Ethics as an inquiry into the most 

choiceworthy end for human beings—what it is that will make human 

beings happy. Should we achieve knowledge of this good, writes Aristotle, 

we would better be able to hit on what is needed to achieve it. The inquiry is 

thus concerned not only with articulating what the highest end is, but also 

with discovering “to which of the sciences or capacities it belongs” (1094b26). 

Knowledge of what to pursue and how to pursue it would provide the source 

of proper action, and give us a measure of control over our lives. Aristotle 

thus repeatedly throughout the Ethics emphasizes the practical nature of the 

investigation—that the end being sought by the inquiry is not to know what 

is good, but to become good. 

After a series of apparent digressions in the first half of Book I, Aristotle 

proceeds in chapter 7 to determine “in outline” what kind of activity 

and what kind of life would constitute the good of happiness, articulating 

two criteria that we divine about this good. This good must be final and it 

must be self-sufficient: useless for anything else (1097b1–2), and in need of 

nothing else (1097b7–17). Reconciling these two principles, however, proves 

difficult. Understanding the good as an activity that is done for the sake of 

nothing else, and more importantly, for the sake of which we do all other 

things, permits us to understand the goodness of other things inasmuch as 

they contribute to and provide the means for the highest good or activity.


The good understood in this way provides the principle of the good’s unity. 

However, explaining the goodness of these lower activities in light of the best 

requires positing the dependence of that best activity on what is inferior to it, 

thereby bringing into question the self-sufficiency of that good. Alternatively, 

if thought were to provide wholly for itself, without dependence on any other 

thing or action, that would leave nothing to explain why or for what reason 

human beings act at all. Aristotle’s first account of the good would therefore 

seem to leave us at a crossroads, unable to reconcile necessity of action with a 

theoretical account of the good. 

It is appropriate, then, that Aristotle proceeds in the remainder of I.7 

to determine what happiness for a human being specifically entails by looking 

for what work or function (ergon) is “fitting” to a human being. Just as 

we identify “every expert” as good or bad in accordance with whether he 

performs the function or work assigned to him well, so we might discover 

the good of the human being by discovering the proper function of the 

human being. In so doing, Aristotle immediately excludes having life and 

perception as these belong to plants and animals as well. What belongs to 

human beings, Aristotle concludes, is “some practice of one possessing reason 

[logos]” (1098a4–5). Some type of rational activity is the human work, 

but this definition of the human work is nevertheless complicated by what 

reason (logos) is for a human being. Human reason is not a seamless whole 

but rather divides into a part “having [reason] and thinking” and another 

that “obeys reason” or is “persuaded” by reason. In this outline of the human 

work provided here, Aristotle thus leaves unspecified whether simple life and 

sensation are excluded because they are activities belonging also to beings 

lower than human or whether they are not specific and peculiar to human 

beings alone. 

This question is suppressed at the end of Book I by Aristotle’s account 

of the soul. Aristotle here divides the soul into a rational and nonrational 

part, with the former dividing into a part that has reason “in itself,” and an 

appetitive part that is rational inasmuch as it listens to reason, “like a son listens 

to his father” (1103a4). This division of logos allows virtue to be divided 

into intellectual and ethical components, which are the excellences of each 

part. However, as has been noted by others, Aristotle does not articulate the 

relationship between these two parts. He does not say what part of the soul 

enables the rational part to give commands to the part that listens and obeys, 

and so leaves the reader to wonder how the “rational part” that is not reason


9 

in itself is related at all to reason itself. 6 The indeterminacy of the parts of the 

soul not only leaves the relationship between the rational parts ambiguous, 

it also allows for the introduction of an external standard of right reason to 

work on the soul. 7 

This ambiguity in the soul prefigures a new division of the parts of the 

soul that precedes his account of the intellectual virtues in Book VI. There the 

rational part is divided in twain again, although not between the appetitive 

part that obeys right reason and the thinking part whose function remains 

indeterminate, but ultimately between a part of thought that comprehends 

the unchanging, necessary, and eternal beings, the virtue of which is wisdom 

(sophia), and a part that comprehends those things about which we can 

deliberate and that are thus not necessary, the virtue of which is prudence 

(phronēsis) (1139a6–20). This division originates in the need for right reason 

within the soul that was absent from the account of the soul in Book 

I; for something to command and guide the appetitive part; for some sort 

of knowledge to provide the missing principle of right reason for action. 

Prudence would seem to answer this need, since its function is to give commands, 

to tell us what to do in particular. 

But prudence as the ruling virtue of the soul proves problematic in two 

ways. First, prudence as ruler is dependent on moral virtue, for without the 

desire for the proper and noble end, prudence is reduced to cleverness or 

terribleness, which is identical to prudence in being able to deliberate well 

about means to given ends (1144a20–24). Only if the end is right can excellent 

deliberation be prudence, but prudence does not provide the end. Its 

dependence on moral virtue for that end would undermine its claim to be the 

ruling virtue of the soul. 

This problem produces a second perplexity that reflects a concern raised 

by Aristotle at the end of Book I about the ruling principle of the soul. If prudence 

only reasons about the means to the end then it would not seem to be 

necessary to a human being fulfilling his or her good. In place of having prudence 

in the soul, an actor could simply obey a prudent person and achieve 

6 

See, for example, Michael Davis, The Soul of the Greeks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 

2011), 57–58. 

7 

It is worth mentioning that Aristotle introduced this discussion of the soul in Book I as especially 

appropriate for a statesman (politikos), and therefore as a useful but not an entirely precise or accurate 

account (1102a10–30). The indeterminate structure of the soul presented would seem to preserve a role 

for, and perhaps even require, politics. Because correct reason is not found within the soul, the soul 

lacks a commanding part and so is directed outward in such a way as to provide a place for reason to 

emanate from an educator, a role that might be filled by law or the statesman. Politikē emerges as a 

candidate to fill the void in the soul that remains after the psychology of Book I (1103b1–8).

1 0 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 42 / Issue 1 

the same good, much like we simply listen to the doctor’s prescription in order 

to achieve health without knowing what the doctor knows (1143b22–30). This 

quandary is initially resolved by the argument that there is a difference between 

doing these things through ignorance and doing them knowingly, much like 

there is a difference between obeying the law voluntarily and doing so from 

compulsion. The outward manifestation and product is the same, but they are 

not of equal stature, for being good means not only doing good things, but 

also knowingly doing them for their own sake. Thus the origin of moral action 

greatly determines its character and praiseworthiness (1144a13–22). This is to 

say that one cannot analogize prudence to a technē—the right reason inherent 

in virtuous action cannot emanate externally, as it does in the arts (technai). 

Prudence is not like the medical art (cf. 1140b3–10). 

Along with this perplexity in Book VI is another, which arises from the fact 

that the account of intellectual virtue culminates in the radical depreciation 

and lowering of the human things, including the human good. Aristotle closes 

his investigation of intellectual virtue by concluding that wisdom (sophia)— 

the knowledge of those things most honorable by nature, i.e., the eternal things 

that exist of necessity and are neither generated nor subject to corruption—is 

the highest intellectual excellence. This virtue, he argues, is not at all concerned 

with the good for the human being “for there are other things whose nature is 

much more divine than that of a human being” (1141a34–1141b2). Thus, “wisdom 

will not contemplate anything as a result of which a human being will 

be happy (since wisdom is not concerned with anything that is coming-intobeing)” 

(1143b19–21). Since prudence is the faculty of command or authority, 

the second perplexity concerning prudence is that the seemingly lower part of 

mind rules—“it would seem strange if prudence, although inferior to wisdom, 

will exercise greater authority than it, for what makes or produces each thing 

rules and exercises authority over that thing” (1143b34–35). Since it seems 

right that the better thing should govern rather than what is worse, how can 

prudence both govern and be inferior to wisdom? 8 

Aristotle explores resolving the perplexity by turning prudence into 

the technical governor acting on behalf of wisdom by articulating it as the 

technē of wisdom, which as technical rule is not rule for its own sake, but for 

something better. Prudence issues its commands and exercises its authority 

8 

Aristotle also suggests, we should note, that the problem with prudence ruling is not only that it 

governs wisdom per se, but also that it exercises more authority (kuriōtera) than wisdom (1143b34). 

That is, it is not only that the best should not be governed by something inferior, but also that the better 

should govern rather than what is inferior.


1 1 

for the sake of wisdom, not to it, just as the doctor does not issue commands 

to health, which is its end, but for the sake of health (1145a7–12). But for this 

resolution to work, prudence must know what wisdom is, like the doctor. It 

must either be wise itself, or it must be directed by wisdom. If the former is the 

case, prudence ought to govern since it is both wise and prudent. If the latter 

is the case, then wisdom must have the capacity to rule or issue commands, 

which would entail a prudence on the part of wisdom. Therefore, there cannot 

be a simple superiority of one to the other or a clear split between the two. 

As a result, the problem raised in Book I that the good must be both final and 

self-sufficient still remains. The proposed resolution turns out not to be able 

to explain how wisdom in fact governs prudence, why it would want to do so, 

or what would enable it to enforce its authority in the soul. The problem that 

Aristotle’s analysis points to is thus that wisdom cannot remain abstracted 

from the lower things that it would have to govern. The necessary uselessness 

of a wisdom without prudence recommends it as the highest activity of the 

human soul, but renders it dependent inasmuch as it cannot rule. 

Socrates thus makes an appearance near the end of Book VI, not as a 

representative of wisdom (this honor goes to Thales), but as a representative 

of the claim that all the virtues are logoi. Socrates is aware of the problem of 

wisdom and its relation to action in a way that the wise cannot be, a problem 

that lies at the heart of the human soul and its direction to the good, which 

must be neglected by the wise, who concern themselves solely with greater 

than human things. Socrates attempts to provide wholeness to the soul by 

collapsing virtue into knowledge. This attempt is a way of putting together 

thought and moral action and remedying the deficiency, not only of moral 

virtue but also of wisdom by reducing the former to the latter. This attempt 

to resolve the quandary of soul’s wholeness by wisdom is thus the origin of 

the new beginning in Book VII, which puts Socrates’s claim to the test. Book 

VI thus sets the stage for a new consideration of the human and the divine, 

the self-sufficient and the best, and ultimately a reconsideration of the human 

soul in light of an element of the soul that had been neglected in his previous 

accounts—spiritedness (thumos). 

The Divine and Socrates’s Critique of Incontinence 

Aside from his claim that his wisdom consisted in the awareness of what 

he did not know, Socrates’s most famous argument is arguably his claim 

that no one knowingly acts contrary to what is best. The question whether


incontinence exists has occupied millennia of Western thought, with numerous 

books and articles still being published on the problem today. Aristotle 

was among the first to take up the issue explicitly, devoting a good portion of 

Book VII of the Ethics to the examination of Socrates’s argument and, therewith, 

the phenomenon of incontinence and its manifestations. Although 

much scholarly attention has been paid to this part of Aristotle’s writing, 

much of it has treated Aristotle’s account of incontinence independently of 

the context within which he examines the problem. It is rarely noted that 

Aristotle raises the problem after beginning anew in Book VII, or that he 

raises incontinence and continence to be inquired into alongside another, 

often ignored, feature of Book VII—the divine and brutish. Book VII is 

bookended by separate accounts of the human relation to the divine, and 

a full understanding of continence and incontinence requires understanding 

why and how these new moral possibilities are related to the divine and 

brutish. 

Introducing Aristotle’s new beginning in Book VII is a more comprehensive 

list of “forms pertaining to character” than we have yet seen. Alongside 

vice are incontinence (which had been mentioned in passing) and brutishness 

(which is new), the other characteristics to be avoided. Each of these is 

a contrary of another distinct characteristic, virtue in the case of vice, and 

continence in the case of incontinence. The contrary of brutishness receives 

a less direct description: 

As for the contrary of brutishness, it would be especially appropriate 

to speak of the virtue that is beyond us, a certain heroic and divine 

virtue—just as Homer has written, when Priam says about Hector that 

he was exceedingly good, “and did not seem to be a child of any mortal 

man, but of a god.” As a result, if (as people assert) human beings 

become gods through an excess [huperbolē] of virtue, it is clear that 

something of this sort would be the characteristic opposite to brutishness. 

For just as a brute animal has neither vice nor virtue, so also a 

god does not either; rather, the characteristic belonging to a god is 

more honorable than virtue and that belonging to a brute is of some 

genus other than vice. (1145a18–27) 

Aristotle’s claim that there can be an excess of virtue is of course inconsistent 

with the position he has thus far endorsed in the Ethics: that virtue is a mean 

between excess and deficiency, and that the excessive is essentially contrary 

to reason, and thus there can never be an excess of virtue within that understanding. 

And how Aristotle proceeds emphasizes this tension: immediately 

after claiming there is a divine and heroic virtue (represented by Hector), he


1 3 

denies that there is any such thing as virtue of the god. 9 Book VII begins with 

a morally disorienting opening, for the introduction of the divine seems to 

threaten the horizon of human action or virtue. 

With this divine standard in the background, Aristotle turns to what 

appears to be the main issue of Book VII: “what concerns incontinence, softness, 

and delicacy…as well as what concerns continence and steadfastness” 

(1145a35–36). In keeping with Aristotle’s new beginning, the examination of 

continence and incontinence initiates a new approach to moral phenomena. 

Aristotle proceeds by laying out the perplexities and opinions that arise from 

the phenomena and experience of incontinence. Initially, Aristotle says his 

intention is to resolve the most troubling questions while leaving common 

opinion undisturbed. After laying out the perplexities (aporiai) about these 

phenomena in chapter 2, however, Aristotle qualifies his initial promise to 

resolve the difficulties of continence and incontinence by concluding that 

only some of these perplexities ought to be resolved, promising to leave some 

remaining (compare 1145b2–8 with 1146b6–8). Aside from the new emphasis 

on the aporiai that his approach now institutes, and his equivocal presentation 

of his purpose with regard to them, there is another new feature to his 

manner of inquiry. Aristotle’s earlier discussions of both moral and intellectual 

virtue were preceded by accounts of the soul that guided his accounts 

of virtue (compare 1102a5–1103a10; 1139a1–17); but here Aristotle does not 

mention the soul let alone provide an account of the soul to guide his inquiry 

into continence and incontinence, as he did for the virtues. In doing so, Aristotle’s 

procedure suggests that any solution to the perplexing phenomenon of 

incontinence must in some way answer to our experience of it. At the same 

time—initially at least—it suppresses the importance of the soul in reaching 

a theoretical solution: as we will see, the soul and its parts are all but ignored 

in the formal analysis of incontinence that Aristotle undertakes in chapter 3. 

The most important of the perplexities raised by the experience with 

incontinence and our opinions about it is undoubtedly the one that Socrates 

raises in objecting to the very existence of incontinence: 

Someone might be perplexed as to how a person, though he forms a 

correct conviction, is incontinent. Some, then, deny that a person who 

has scientific knowledge can be incontinent; for it would be a terrible 

9 

The reference to Hector adds to the difficulty, for Priam’s description of him as having divine virtue 

comes only after he is killed by Achilles. Homer, in contrast, regularly ascribes heroic virtue to Hector 

before he is killed. For a detailed account of the reference to the Iliad, see Burger, Aristotle’s Dialogue 

with Socrates, who concludes: “Aristotle seems to have gone out of his way to furnish a particularly 

problematic illustration of divine virtue” (133).


thing, when science is present (as Socrates used to suppose), for something 

else to overpower and drag it around as if it were a slave. For 

Socrates used to do battle against the argument [logos] in its entirety, 

on the grounds that no such thing as incontinence exists; nobody acts 

contrary to what is best while supposing that he is so acting; he acts 

instead through ignorance. This argument [logos], then, is manifestly 

in contention with the phenomena, and one must investigate, if in fact 

this experience occurs through ignorance, what the character of the 

ignorance is. For it is manifest that before he is in the grip of passion, a 

person who is incontinent does not at least think [oietai] [that he ought 

to act as he then proceeds to act]. (1145b22–28) 

Aristotle’s presentation of this Socratic puzzle itself contains a number of 

puzzles. First, Aristotle attributes to Socrates a warlike defense of the authority 

of scientific knowledge against the logos, one that does not seem to accord 

with the puritanical rationalism that is seemingly implied in the Socratic 

thesis. Do the Socratic thesis and Socrates himself compel a consideration 

of thumos, and if so, why? Even more puzzling than Socrates’s spirited 

defense of the power and authority of reason, Aristotle presents Socrates as 

“doing battle against the logos” (emacheto pros ton logon), which is precisely 

how common opinion understands the condition of the incontinent and 

continent, who undergo an internal struggle against reason. Indeed, the formulation 

is nearly identical to how Aristotle presented the condition of the 

incontinent and continent in his first account of the soul in Book I, whose 

souls were said to have something in them that “does battle with and strains 

against the logos” (machetai kai antiteinei tōi logōi) (1102b18–19). Socrates’s 

paradox is not only spirited, but Aristotle hints that it also resembles incontinence, 

the belief Socrates is attacking. Socrates’s spirited defense of scientific 

knowledge prepares the way for the introduction of spiritedness (thumos) 

and, more specifically, incontinence with respect to thumos that Aristotle 

will take up in the later chapters of Book VII, and which had been all but 

ignored in the earlier parts of the Ethics. 

The most important puzzle, however, may be the often overlooked 

ambiguity contained within Aristotle’s presentation of Socrates’s formulaic 

rejection of incontinence. Most commentators read Aristotle to mean that 

Socrates is defending the position that we cannot act contrary to what we 

know to be the best course of action possible for us, since we necessarily and 

always pursue what is best, or best for us. If this is so, knowledge is to be 

understood as being in service of our longing for the good. Knowledge is 

reduced to an instrument—to be obeyed, of course, but not for its own sake


1 5 

but for the sake of that which it governs, the human being as a whole. 10 On 

these grounds, there might be no reason for us to reason at all, for if someone 

else were to know what is best for us, we could simply take guidance 

for our lives from such an authority. 11 Indeed, knowledge would be entirely 

dethroned, as it would be irrelevant whether we achieved our good through 

reason or chance or necessity. 

Alternatively, however, Aristotle’s description of Socrates’s battle against 

the logos could be read to mean that we never act contrary to knowledge 

because knowledge is what is held to be best in us—that Socrates’s teaching 

is about the necessary and proper order and arrangement of the soul. This 

ambiguity concerning the meaning of the authority and power of knowledge 

insisted upon by Socrates has at its center a puzzling problem. Is this 

knowledge to be understood as an end in its own right or as a means to some 

further end? 12 Or, if neither is sufficient, what is it that binds the two together? 

Here we would seem to be reminded of the divine being that contemplates. If 

what such a being contemplates is its own intellect, then there might be some 

ground for uniting reason as both a means and an end. But if knowledge can 

only be present in unmoved contemplation, human action and its relation to 

knowledge remain unexplained. Can only ignorance explain the activity of 

being human? 

All of this raises the possibility that when Aristotle introduces continence 

and incontinence alongside the godlike and brutish as those things 

that constitute what is “new” about his new beginning, he does so because 

these characteristics are related in an essential way. Indeed, Socrates’s thesis 

in light of Aristotle opening Book VII with the possibility of human beings 

10 

Plato’s Protagoras, the dialogue in which the Socratic thesis that knowledge is virtue is developed 

most clearly, is the same dialogue in which Socrates formulates a hedonistic doctrine—that all we do 

is for the sake of pleasure and avoiding pain. Hence, it would seem that, so understood, the absolute 

indefeasibility of knowledge is coeval with reducing knowledge to a handmaiden of the desire for 

pleasure (352a–362a). 

11 

One of the other perplexities Aristotle lays out in chapter 2 (but never explicitly resolves) makes 

precisely this point. The Sophists put forward the thesis that foolishness combined with incontinence 

would be “virtue,” because the resulting action would be the right one. If the correct external action 

were the standard, this would hold true, as it would be utterly end-directed. Sarah Broadie points out 

that Aristotle never expressly addresses this perplexity, because it is the simplest one and Aristotle has 

already in various ways rejected this idea (Broadie, Ethics with Aristotle [Oxford: Oxford University 

Press, 1991], 267). She does not note that Socrates’s formulation raises this as a question, for the 

authority of reason as Socrates presents it could be reduced to its benefits for action. 

12 

In Aristotle’s Politics, the rule of reason over desire is said to be properly kingly and political, rather 

than despotic (Pol. 1254b4–6), and the principal difference between them is whether the rule is for the 

benefit of the ruler or the good common to ruler and ruled.


becoming a god through excessive virtue raises the following question: if the 

“divine and heroic virtue” that is “beyond us” is “more honorable” than mere 

human virtue, is the perfection of human life, and thus the virtue of a human 

being, possible? This question raised by Aristotle’s introduction serves as a 

fitting introduction to the discussion of continence and incontinence that 

occupies the greatest portion of Book VII, at the center of which is Aristotle’s 

analysis of the Socratic claim that “no one acts contrary to the best while 

supposing he is doing so” (1145b26). 13 As we have seen, Socrates’s formulation 

reduces vice to ignorance and accordingly raises doubts about moral culpability, 

thereby threatening moral life as such. At the same time it transforms 

virtue into knowledge in a way that sets perfection as the standard for virtue. 

Given this standard, we must wonder whether knowingly refraining from 

the attempt to achieve perfection—to divinize ourselves—is even possible. 

This question of incontinence—whether it is possible to act contrary to what 

we hold to be best—is raised by this awareness that the best is better than us, 

of the place of the human in the whole. The moderate choice of mere human 

virtue would shine forth as inferior to the divine life now held out as the 

highest standard for the human being. Thus, if Socrates’s formula is true, 

we must long to be divine and must be compelled to pursue this longing, for 

to do otherwise would be incontinence in its truest form—knowingly doing 

what is contrary to what we hold to be best: divine activity. 

At the end of Book VII Aristotle implicitly (and counterintuitively) 

raises this issue of the relation between the divine and the characteristics 

of continence and incontinence by coming close to the hedonist view that 

pleasure is the best: “The same thing is not always pleasant on account of 

our nature’s not being simple. …The god always enjoys a pleasure that is one 

and simple, for there is an activity not only of motion but also of motionlessness, 

and pleasure resides more in rest than in motion. But ‘change in all 

things is sweet,’ as the poet has it, on account of a certain defective condition” 

(1154b25–28). For the god, the divine activity (contemplation) and pleasure 

are so intertwined that it is impossible to separate the two, and therefore the 

best activity simply is coeval with the best pleasure. But the divine activity as 

13 

For an account of the ways in which Aristotle presents Socrates as a puritanical intellectual in the 

Ethics, see Burger, Aristotle’s Dialogue with Socrates, 132–35. Burger’s reading of the Ethics suggests 

that although Aristotle is critical of Socrates’s formal (and formulaic) arguments, he engages those 

arguments in a way that ultimately reveals that Aristotle is aware of a deeper complexity in Socrates’s 

teaching. While we are sympathetic to this approach, we do not seek to answer directly whether the 

formal presentation of the Socratic position is actually the correct characterization of Socrates’s final 

understanding of incontinence. Our intention is rather to uncover Aristotle’s engagement with the 

argument against incontinence that he attributes to Socrates.


1 7 

performed by a human being cannot be the same experience, for it cannot be 

simply and continuously pleasant. Divine activity for human beings would 

instead seem to require pleasure and pain to be overcome in some way. If this 

is the case, Aristotle’s discussion of the divine is a proper introduction for the 

standard of continence, which (unlike moral virtue) promises to overcome 

the desire for the pleasant. The simplicity constituting the pleasure of the 

god is matched by the simplicity of continence, which presumes that thought 

alone can govern action without the aid and cooperation of desire. Whereas 

human virtue in the context of the awareness of the divine comes to light as 

incontinence, divine excellence for human beings becomes manifest as the 

overcoming of pleasure and pain, that is, as a version of continence. The longing 

for continence seems to indicate a desire to become godlike and simple, a 

longing to be free of desire that reveals our insufficiency. 

In chapter 3, Aristotle offers an exposition of incontinence that explores 

the different ways incorrect action might be reconciled with our possession 

of knowledge. Aristotle’s argument assumes an incontinent actor who possesses 

knowledge, and his first two attempts to reconcile incontinence and 

knowledge rest on a distinction between the possession of knowledge and 

the active contemplation of this knowledge (1146b24–1147a9). In the moment 

of action, for example, we can know but fail to contemplate what we know, 

with the result that our action is contrary to what we know is best. 14 Similarly, 

inasmuch as practical reasoning consists in putting together the universal 

premises of action with the particular circumstances, it is possible that we 

can know the universal involved but fail to see the particular premise, in 

which case the action will be contrary to the scientific knowledge of the principle 

that is actively used. 

Initially, the first explanation reconciling incontinence and knowledge 

seems purely formal, explaining what the experience of incontinence in 

the knower could be, but not how or why in the incontinent the active contemplation 

of what we “ought not to do” is suppressed or rendered inactive 

and unused in the knower. It does not, in other words, appear to be a causal 

account of “knowing incontinence.” However, a closer look reveals that the 

“command” Aristotle identifies here as actively contemplated and “used” 

or simply possessed is negative and prohibitory because Aristotle is raising 

14 

That the crucial distinction Aristotle is making here is between the “use” and the “possession” of 

knowledge also perhaps points to the problem of the integrity of knowledge in the Socratic thesis, 

or the ambivalence of the rule—i.e., the usefulness—of knowledge. Since the use of anything may 

deprive it of dignity by denying its integrity, Aristotle raises the possibility that the suppression of 

knowledge in the incontinent may be due to the soul’s paradoxical endeavor to honor knowledge.


the problem of the relation between contemplating and acting. In principle, 

we can infinitely contemplate what we must not do, for it requires us to do 

nothing at all, and there is no moment in the contemplation when we would 

by necessity have to stop contemplating it. But he does not say the same of 

positive action, knowing what to do, which may require suspending contemplation 

in order to act, and thus require imperfect contemplation. 

If Aristotle’s first two arguments give an account of what incontinence 

is for one who knows in this qualified way, the next two arguments give an 

explicit account of the cause of our knowledge going inactive. Ultimately, 

Aristotle concludes that the experience of incontinence is like the experience 

of drunkenness or madness or sleep, one in which our knowing is suppressed 

by the passions to such a degree that we can speak what we know without 

really understanding what we say. 

Aristotle’s explanation of incontinence in terms of the absence of knowledge 

in the actor appears to vindicate Socrates’s position that it is a failure 

in knowing of some sort, or temporary lapses of knowledge we possess, that 

lead us to act contrary to that knowledge. Indeed, Aristotle expressly reaches 

agreement with Socrates, on the grounds that “it is not when scientific knowledge 

in the authoritative sense is present that the experience of incontinence 

occurs, nor is it the science that is dragged around on account of passion, but 

rather that which is bound up with perception” (1147b16–17). 

Although Aristotle’s reconciliation with the Socratic position is explicit— 

if we know scientifically we cannot act contrary to such knowledge—this 

agreement does not resolve a central issue. For while Aristotle formally 

agrees with Socrates that science is not dragged around like a slave, his reasons 

for drawing this conclusion say nothing with regard to action. Indeed, 

on his account the final premise of action cannot be scientific knowledge, 

because the final premise in action is a particular rather than universal, 

and is therefore “not scientifically knowable as the universal is scientifically 

knowable” (1147b19). Aristotle’s affirmation of the Socratic position thus 

preserves the integrity of scientific knowledge, but does so at the expense 

of denying it authority over desire or passion or action. There is reason to 

wonder whether this explanation can satisfy what Socrates was seeking—an 

indefeasible knowledge to control action. A second look at Aristotle’s account 

of the incontinent knower is therefore necessary. 

Prudence and Science 

Aristotle begins his analysis of incontinence in chapter 3 by asking whether 

anyone acts incontinently “knowingly [eidotes] or not, and how knowingly”


1 9 

(an open-ended question that is missing the verb to which the modifier 

“knowingly” attaches). This typical rendering by Aristotle’s translators asks 

whether the incontinent are so knowingly or not. As we saw, however, Aristotle’s 

examination of the issue led to the question of what sort of knowledge, 

if any, is controlling over action. It is therefore appropriate that Aristotle’s 

characteristic way of writing allows for another possible reading: “whether 

anyone acts knowingly or not, and how knowingly.” Aristotle’s well-known 

questioning of the existence of incontinence contains a far less acknowledged 

questioning of continence and its existence, which presumes the control of 

knowledge over action. 

Seeing that Aristotle does not really preserve the spirit of Socrates’s position 

on incontinence inasmuch as his account of incontinence ultimately 

does not explain the authority of knowledge, some scholars have attempted 

to save the view that Aristotle agrees with Socrates on significantly broader 

grounds. Early in his discussion of incontinence, these scholars point out, 

Aristotle dismissed the view that what it is in the incontinent that resists but 

is ultimately overcome by pleasures is prudence, because no one would say 

that the prudent can voluntarily do base things; thus the prudent could not 

undergo the experience of incontinence (1146a5–10). 15 In spite of Aristotle’s 

resistance to the Socratic thesis, then, this admission amounts to his fundamental 

and ultimately unqualified agreement with Socrates, for it does seem 

to arrive at one formulation of the Socratic position that some kind of knowledge, 

or rather prudence, is virtue. 16 

While this reading has some weight, it also obscures what seems to be the 

central issue: the relationship between human action and scientific knowledge. 

The strangest feature of Aristotle’s examination into whether someone 

can be incontinent knowingly is his use of “science” (epistēmē) throughout 

the entire discussion. 17 As Aristotle presented it up to this point in the Ethics, 

15 

Schaefer writes: “The view that Aristotle…adopt[s]—that prudence is incompatible with wrong 

action—is actually a form of the Socratic thesis [that a knower cannot act contrary to his knowledge of 

what is best]” (“Wisdom and Morality,” 227). See also Tessitore, Reading Aristotle’s “Ethics,” 57. 

16 

Burger also highlights the tension between prudence and scientific knowledge in Aristotle’s 

account (Aristotle’s Dialogue with Socrates, 144). 

17 

The primary focus of this part of our analysis is the question of the treatment of incontinence 

involving scientific knowledge. Aristotle, it should be noted, leaves open the possibility that incontinence 

could also involve deeply held opinions and not scientific knowledge (1145b30–1146a10). 

Although the purpose of our initial analysis is to show how Aristotle questions the relationship 

between science and continence, we ultimately intend to show that by questioning the possibility of 

human beings developing a science of action, Aristotle shows that all apparent instances of scientific 

continence are in fact instances of continence in accordance with opinion, just as all acts of scientific 

incontinence are in fact instances of incontinence with respect to opinion.


scientific knowledge—epistēmē—seemed irrelevant to human action. For 

instance, in his thematic account of science in the presentation of intellectual 

virtue in Book VI, Aristotle noted that “we all suppose that what we know 

scientifically does not admit of being otherwise,” for which reason it is also 

supposed that one can possess scientific knowledge only of things that exist 

by necessity, that is, of eternal things (1139b20–24). In contrast, it is on the 

grounds that the human things are subject to variability and contingency that 

Aristotle demotes the human good, and perhaps even the good itself (which 

varies from species to species) from being a proper object of contemplation for 

wisdom, the highest of the intellectual virtues and scientific knowledge of the 

highest things. Instead, he relegates this task to prudence, the excellence of 

that part of the rational soul that considers matters about which one can deliberate. 

It is likewise prudence that Aristotle describes as properly concerned 

both with the realm of action and with the action itself: “That prudence is not 

science is manifest: prudence concerns the ultimate particular thing…for the 

action to be performed is of this kind” (1142a25). There is no science of the 

ultimate particular, and thus there is no science of action. 

It is therefore not surprising that Aristotle ends Book VI by opposing the 

Socratic teaching that assimilates virtue and scientific knowledge: “Socrates… 

used to suppose that the virtues were all reasoned accounts [logoi], for he 

supposed that all are kinds of scientific knowledge [epistēmai], but we hold 

that they are accompanied by logos” (1144b27–29). 18 The Socratic position 

is in this light an implicit rejection of prudence, which is and must be the 

acknowledgment of the dependence and imperfection of logos; the perfection 

of logos would require the perfection of its objects—prudence would, 

at least as it has been presented up to this point in the Ethics, be dissolved 

entirely and there would be nothing about which anyone could deliberate. 

The possible assimilation of prudence into scientific knowledge is therefore 

essentially related to the underlying division between Aristotle and Socrates, 

which is whether knowledge alone is sufficient to perfect the human being. 

We are therewith led to wonder whether Aristotle does not mean for us to see 

Socrates’s spirited rejection of incontinence—his doing “battle against the 

logos” in defense of scientific knowledge—as rooted in the longing to bridge 

the chasm between the human things and those things “most honorable by 

nature” that was opened in Book VI. 

18 

Here Aristotle also resists Socratic reductionism by presenting prudence as dependent on the moral 

virtues (1144b29–33). The obvious reason the prudent cannot be incontinent is that the prudent by 

definition possess moderation (1140b12), and thus do not experience the base or excessive desires that 

belong to the continent and incontinent alike.


2 1 

This deeper and more consequential disagreement that accompanies 

Aristotle’s formal agreement with the Socratic thesis—namely, whether there 

is indeed a scientific knowledge of action that it presupposes—is also reflected 

in Aristotle’s action of giving an account of incontinence. For instance, 

when Aristotle discusses incontinence in chapter 3, deliberation is not even 

mentioned, even as prudence is excellent deliberation. In its place, Aristotle 

presents the practical syllogism as the mode of practical reasoning, a kind 

of reasoning that is nowhere mentioned outside of Book VII. Nevertheless, 

scholars have attempted to construct theories of Aristotelian practical reasoning 

from the statements he makes about the syllogistic structure of reasoning 

about action in Book VII. 19 Oddly enough, Aristotle himself discusses the 

practical syllogism only when describing the failure of reasoning, a failure 

that is exemplified in incontinence. 20 The practical syllogism is never shown 

to implement the rule of knowledge over action successfully, and as we shall 

see the syllogism is mentioned again only in Aristotle’s account of another 

form of incontinence, spirited incontinence. Aristotle’s employment of the 

syllogism makes the possibility of a science of action the very issue at stake 

in his account of incontinence. As it is presented, such knowledge cannot 

be successfully transformed into action. The employment of the syllogism 

is a reiteration of the fact that the possibility of a science of action is what 

is at issue in his discussion, as scientific knowledge is limited to that which 

consists in syllogistic demonstration. 

The logical explanation provided by Aristotle of what incontinence in 

general is—qualified knowledge combined with qualified ignorance—will 

on a moment’s reflection seem most strange, not because Aristotle’s reason, 

his logos, is incorrect, but because it is doubtful that we experience our bad 

actions in this way. Does anyone not experience at one point or another a 

struggle in the soul with regard to what we should do, an experience that is 

utterly unaccounted for in Aristotle’s formal arguments as to what incontinence 

is? 21 If so, we must ask whether Aristotle’s arguments are intended to 

19 

For example, see Dennis McKerlie, “The Practical Syllogism and Akrasia,” Canadian Journal of 

Philosophy 21 (1991): 299–321; and Anthony Kenny, “The Practical Syllogism and Incontinence,” 

Phronesis 11 (1968): 163–84. 

20 

The practical syllogism is mentioned only in De motu animalium, which is about animal motion 

and thus not specifically human reasoning as the cause of action. 

21 

W. D. Ross rejects Aristotle’s explanation of incontinence in these terms: “[Aristotle’s explanation] 

says nothing of a moral struggle; the minor premise of the moral syllogism (and with it the conclusion 

‘I ought not to do this’) has never been present, or it has already been suppressed by the appetite. And 

the account which explains how the wrong act can be done in the absence of this knowledge cannot 

explain how the knowledge has come to be absent. But Aristotle elsewhere shows himself alive to the


demonstrate the illusoriness of human experience, to show the great disparity 

between our logos and the experiences we undergo. 22 At the same time, 

incontinence and the manner in which it exists is itself explained by the fact 

that there is no perfect transparency of the “ultimate particular” in which 

action takes place—hence no scientific knowledge of it is possible. Aristotle’s 

argument about what incontinence is and the manner in which it exists—the 

impossibility of providing a logos that accounts entirely for the experience of 

the particular action—at once explains incontinence, but this explanation is 

prudently qualified by awareness that any such account will be an imperfect 

and incomplete interpretation of what our action really is and how it comes 

about. We might call this the “human wisdom” that Socrates claimed to possess—the 

awareness of our ignorance. 

Until the discussion of the practical syllogism in Book VII, Aristotle had 

presented reasoning about what to do by providing models that exemplified 

acting well, models that culminated in his characterization of the prudent. 

Indeed, when Aristotle gave his account of prudence, the perfection of practical 

reasoning, he expressly declined to speak about “prudence” at all. Instead 

he said that prudence can best be understood by looking at those who are 

said to be prudent (phronimoi)—the standard is made evident in particular 

human beings. The prudent person, not prudence in general, is the standard 

for acting well. Moreover, the rational thought of the prudent person is more 

a perceptual capacity than a syllogistic one—seeing the universal in the particular, 

rather than abstracting an impersonal universal principle from which 

one can deduce the correct action in particular circumstances. Prudence, 

then, consists in the refusal to disembody the universal from its manifestation 

in particular actions and particular characters. That continence and 

incontinence would consist in the employment of the practical syllogism 

is nevertheless appropriate; both must replace the perception essential to 

prudence with a principle, or formula, for this prudential perception is not 

possible without the virtuous dispositions that dispose us to take pleasure in 

what is good (1140b17–20), and thus the dependence of prudence on desire. 

Incontinence is the failed and continence the (apparently) successful severing 

and abstraction of principle from desire—the simplification of the soul that is 

held out as the highest, most divine possibility. 

existence of a moral struggle, a conflict between rational wish and appetite” (W. D. Ross, Aristotle 

[Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1962], 217). 

22 

For an analysis of some of the issues perception poses for akrasia, see Jessica Moss, “Akrasia and 

Perceptual Illusion,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 91 (2009): 119–56.


2 3 

It is often overlooked that Aristotle’s analysis of incontinence does not 

finally say much in support of continence, even though the disproving of 

the existence of incontinence is premised on the unproven assumption that 

virtue is knowledge. Socrates’s position is that no one acts contrary to what he 

holds to be best—that continence exists while incontinence does not. But if, 

as Aristotle shows, incontinence is rooted in the impossibility of having a science 

over what is most decisive in the action—over the ultimate thing in the 

action—how does continence really exist? How is knowledge actualized into 

action? Moreover, to the extent that the experience of incontinence in such 

cases is explicable as the temporary absence of knowledge possessed only in 

potential, what explains the experience of continence? How is it that we experience 

temptation, but overcome it? Aristotle’s analysis in chapter 3 raises 

these questions, and his subsequent account seems designed to shed light on 

them, especially with the introduction of spiritedness, which highlights the 

principle of action that is missing from his presentation of continence. 

Continence and Spiritedness 

That Aristotle’s agreement with the Socratic position at the close of chapter 3 

is not as whole as it might seem is perhaps revealed most clearly in his deeds. 

Socrates’s thesis is that incontinence does not exist at all, but Aristotle’s 

discussion over the next seven chapters of Book VII assumes the existence 

of incontinence and introduces different kinds of incontinence, the most 

important being incontinence in regard to spiritedness. His rational conclusion 

does not seem to dictate the rest of his discussion, which would not take 

place if Socrates were really correct—Aristotle’s actions, in other words, are 

contrary to the logos of incontinence’s nonexistence. 

In chapters 4 and 5, Aristotle moves to distinguish unqualified incontinence 

from qualified continence by limiting the former to the desires for the 

pleasures of the body that define moderation and licentiousness (one might 

say he gives the qualifications for unqualified incontinence). Other forms of 

incontinence, on the other hand, are qualified by the fact that they involve 

pleasures and desires tied to noble and serious things that are choiceworthy 

in themselves, such as honor, victory, familial love, and spiritedness, even 

if excess in these things is base (1148a23, 1148b5). As these noble and serious 

things all seem to involve spiritedness, it is fitting that this discussion 

culminates in the sustained account in chapter 6 of incontinence in regard to


spiritedness (thumos), an expression or part of the soul that had all but been 

ignored up to this point in the Ethics. 23 

Aristotle begins his account of incontinent spiritedness by showing the 

ways that it diverges from unqualified incontinence. His analysis thereby not 

only sheds light on spirited incontinence, it also further develops the qualifications 

or features of unqualified incontinence in a way that invites reflection 

on the relationship between spiritedness (thumos) and desire (epithumia). 

Spirited incontinence, argues Aristotle, is less shameful than unqualified 

incontinence, because it follows reason, at least in a way: 

Spiritedness seems to listen to reason, but to hear wrong, like hasty 

servants, who run off before they have heard everything their master 

tells them, and err in carrying out the command, or as dogs bark as 

soon as there is a knock at the door, before examining whether it is a 

friend. So spiritedness, because of its heated and swift nature, hears 

something, and though it does not hear an order, it sets out after 

revenge. For reason [logos] and imagination [phantasia] indicate that 

a hubristic insult or a slight has been received, and spiritedness, as if 

it inferred from a syllogism that one ought to wage war against such 

a thing, immediately becomes harsh. But as for desire, if reason or 

sense perception merely says that something is pleasant, it sets off after 

enjoyment. As a result, spiritedness [thumos] follows reason in a way, 

but desire [epithumia] does not. Desire, then, is more shameful. For 

someone who lacks self-restraint when it comes to spiritedness is in 

a way conquered by reason, whereas the other person is conquered by 

desire and not by reason. (1149a26–1149b3) 

Because he describes it as less shameful and as more reasonable, Aristotle is 

often understood to hold spirited incontinence as less bad than its unqualified 

counterpart. 24 However, his explanation of the interplay between shame 

and reason is more complex. Action occurs in the examples provided, not at 

the behest of reason itself, but on behalf of the false reasoning of spiritedness 

(not surprisingly the actions it produces are hardly reasonable). Its aim is 

unreasonable and, as a result, so too are its deeds. Spiritedness employs reason, 

but it does so in pursuit of an unreasonable aim it holds to be reasonable, 

23 

Chapter 5 presents brutish desire as a second kind of qualified incontinence. Unlike the desire for 

necessary things that defines the sphere of moderation and licentiousness and unqualified incontinence, 

brutishness involves the desire for unnecessary and inhuman things (such as eating children). 

24 

For example, see Carlo Natali, “NE VII.5–6: Beastliness, Irascibility, akrasia,” in Aristotle’s “Nicomachean 

Ethics,” Book VII: Symposium Aristotelicum, ed. Carlo Natali (New York: Oxford University 

Press, 2009), 114.


2 5 

inferring its action as if from a syllogism. 25 Those who are led by spiritedness 

in this way are conquered by reason, and so think they know what they do 

not. Action prompted by spiritedness is therefore experienced as less shameful, 

for the actor cannot see the reason to feel shame; it involves thinking that 

one’s actions are in accordance with reason when they are not. 

In contrast, Aristotle claims that desire rushes off to enjoy something 

only after having been told by reason that it is pleasant. In this sense, desire 

seems to listen better to reason than does spiritedness, which hears reason 

incorrectly, or listens only in part. At the same time, the shame produced by 

action spurred by desire indicates that the action is understood as unreasonable, 

even if the actor correctly reasons (or knows) at the moment of acting 

that the action will produce pleasure. Desire may better hear reason, but 

unlike spiritedness, it is not conquered by it. Acting incontinently (in the 

formal sense) therefore involves pursuing pleasure not simply because it is 

perceived as reasonable to do so, but for the sake of pleasure itself. Doing so is 

shameful because the person knows before and after doing so that the action 

is not in accordance with reason. It is because reason is still active in such 

cases that one may experience the pleasure with shame (i.e., a guilty pleasure). 

Acting according to desire is not more shameful than spirited incontinence 

because it is less reasonable (although it may be); it is more shameful because 

it has a better sense of its lack of reason. Aristotle’s analysis therefore suggests 

a deeper reason for distinguishing spirited incontinence from its unqualified 

counterpart: whereas unqualified incontinence involves acting against what 

one knows to be best, spirited incontinence does not, for it does not know 

what is best, even though it thinks it does. 26 It is experienced as unqualified 

continence—that is, as acting according to what one knows to be best. We 

are therefore led to consider the ways that the spirited incontinent person of 

chapter 6 is compatible with the continent being of chapter 3. 27 

As we saw, Aristotle’s account of continence and scientific knowledge 

in chapter 3 questioned whether any knowledge could have authority over 

25 

Such a person could perhaps be clever, but not prudent (1144a23–37; 1145b23–25). 

26 

The distinction between qualified and unqualified incontinence becomes increasingly complicated 

as the analysis proceeds. The discussion of hubris, for instance, complicates the relationship between 

the sphere of moderation/unqualified incontinence (food and sex) and that of qualified incontinence 

(compare 1149a32–34 and 1149b20–24). 

27 

Note that Aristotle summarizes the difference between spirited and unqualified incontinence as 

the difference between desire and reason (not spiritedness) ruling, a distinction that more obviously 

defines the difference between unqualified incontinence and continence than the difference between 

unqualified incontinence and spirited incontinence.


human action—whether continence is possible for human beings. As part of 

his analysis, he presented continence as the output of a syllogistic reasoning 

that applies scientific knowledge to potential human action. As an example, 

we were told that when faced with a sweet thing, the incontinent ignore the 

scientific knowledge that forbids eating sweet things, and are instead led by 

their desire to follow in action the premise that every sweet thing is pleasant 

(1147a31–35). Continent human beings, in contrast, reasonably “act” (i.e., 

do not eat) in accordance with their perceived scientific knowledge. Much 

like the reasoning of the spirited incontinent of chapter 6, however, those 

continent beings who follow the rule never to eat sweet things must rely on 

incomplete knowledge to do so; since they do not taste and see for themselves, 

they cannot truly know which things are sweet, but instead must rely 

on their imagination or on the testimony of others. 28 More fundamentally, 

such beings must draw the conclusion that health or self-control is in every 

case better than consuming what is sweet, and so must reject both the possibility 

of a food (like an apple) being both sweet and conducive to health, and 

the possibility of eating sweet things in moderation on the proper occasions 

in accordance with moral virtue and prudence. These continent persons can 

therefore be called reasonable in the same way that Aristotle describes the 

spirited incontinent as reasonable: in not tasting, they follow the knowledge 

they think they have—they do not know that they do not know. 

Aristotle’s account of spirited incontinence thus introduces a more complex 

account of the soul, which was all but ignored in the earlier scientific 

chapters of Book VII. Whereas continence could not connect its knowledge 

to action in chapter 3, chapter 6 shows spiritedness providing authority over 

action and desire. 29 But this solution raises a new issue: although the power 

of spiritedness provides the missing principle of action, it at the same time 

makes continence difficult to separate from spirited incontinence, for we 

must wonder whether it is spiritedness rather than reason that is the means 

by which the perceived continent obtain what they hold to be knowledge. 

28 

The most extreme version of this position would be to not eat any food on the chance that it might 

be sweet. 

29 

There may be a sense in which unqualified incontinence also involves spiritedness. In the syllogism 

that describes incontinent deeds, desire seems to “choose” the premise (every sweet is pleasant) over 

and against the command of the competing premise (don’t eat sweets). As Aristotle describes it, the 

chosen premise only states some “fact”: it does not issue a command. Aristotle may mean to imply 

that we could understand the independence of desire from reason in the example as a kind of spirited 

refusal to be governed and controlled by reason. This would help explain the relation of spiritedness 

(thumos) to desire (epithumia—literally “on top of thumos”). Whereas pure thumos is not aware of its 

unreasonableness, desire in which spiritedness is present is so aware.


2 7 

Perhaps when faced with temptation of eating (a sign of one’s dependence 

and decay) the continent person’s spirit simply invents a syllogism that allows 

for the overcoming of the desire. We are led to wonder if even continence 

involves incontinence. For if not, how can those who perceive themselves as 

continent (i.e., as knowers) tell whether their experience of possessing knowledge 

is in fact due to genuine knowledge or to spiritedness? 

Of course, since both the spirited incontinent and the truly continent 

consider themselves reasonable it is not clear that either would assess their 

judgment at all. Those who perceive themselves as continent may not even 

consider, let alone know, that their knowledge may be false. 30 At best, then, 

we can only describe the experience of continence; because of spiritedness, 

we cannot know that we are continent. It seems as though solving the rule 

of bodily desires requires a spirit that makes the knowing implementation of 

knowledge into action impossible. 

Nevertheless, that spirited incontinence may be experienced as unqualified 

continence does not deny that true continence—that true knowledge—may 

be possible. To achieve this continence without incontinence, however, would 

require the achieving of continence in regard to both bodily desires and spiritedness. 

31 By implication, a third part of the soul, with power over both desires 

and spirit, would seem to be necessary. 

But as Aristotle demonstrated in his account of incontinence and knowledge 

in chapter 3, even if such a part of the soul possessed a true knowledge 

that was inviolable by both desire and spirit, it could not explain or cause 

human action. 32 Thus, what is required instead is the rule of reason or knowledge 

over or within a being that does not act. It is therefore fitting that Book 

VII culminates in such a figure, the divine god who achieves the activity of 

30 

That many readers unquestioningly accept the claim that continence is knowledge despite the fact 

that Aristotle offers little proof or argument in support of its existence is not surprising. Continence 

offers an answer to our desire for scientific knowledge of action that has animated our concern with 

taking control of our lives. In other words, Aristotle’s argument seems designed to invite the reader 

to think that he knows what he does not. Aristotle’s discussion of incontinence allows us to think we 

found the answer (knowledge) without us noticing that the reasons for it are missing. By allowing us 

to believe that we understand continence, Aristotle invites us to experience continence, even when we 

do not truly possess it. He also, of course, invites the discovery of complications within his account. It 

is noteworthy that at the beginning of Book VII he promises to leave us in perplexity. 

31 

Aristotle does not speak about continence with respect to spiritedness. 

32 

If, as Aristotle claims, unqualified continence involves victory over desire rather than simply the 

successful resisting of it, then continence in regard to spiritedness would seem to involve the defeat of 

spiritedness. (As noted, Aristotle associates victory with spiritedness. He also suggests that the desire 

for victory could itself be a qualified form of incontinence at 1147b30.)


motionlessness. Such a being is rightly defined as simple, for so would such a 

being be, if it did not have thumos. 

It is no surprise, then, that Aristotle ends Book VII by declaring that living 

as a god is not possible for human beings. Some commenters have called 

this a bitter conclusion, and perhaps rightly so, for it may pain the spirit to 

learn that it cannot be sufficient unto itself. On the other hand, Aristotle’s 

pursuit of the knowledge of the good does not simply end with this observation. 

Rather, he turns his attention to friendship. The desire for wholeness 

that thumos sought to fulfill through itself is turned toward other beings. 

Conclusion 

We have attempted to shed new light both on the unity of Book VII and its 

place in the Ethics by reading Aristotle’s analysis of incontinence in light 

of his largely ignored discussion of spiritedness, and on his account of the 

human being’s relationship to the divine. On our reading, Aristotle’s analysis 

of continence in Book VII, and especially his account of the Socratic thesis 

affirming the mastery of knowledge, exposes a desire, rooted in spiritedness, 

to divinize the soul and transcend the limitations of human life. Contrary to 

the view presented in most interpretations of Aristotle’s work, his discussion 

of continence in Book VII is not a decline from the peaks of virtue reached 

in the preceding books, but is rather an analysis of the possibility of reaching 

an alternative and higher way of life through human reason. We have argued 

that such a life, at least as it is described in terms of scientific reason in Book 

VII, cannot finally provide a coherent answer to the question of the best life 

for human beings. Moreover, Aristotle’s analysis uncovers the difficulty of 

living one’s entire life according to reason simply, because of the particulars 

that such a life entails and the action it requires, and because of the significant 

obstacle spiritedness poses to self-knowledge, and so to human knowledge 

and the possibility of philosophy. 

Needless to say, it goes beyond the scope of this paper to detail the ways 

in which the final three books of the Ethics attempt to solve the problems 

spiritedness poses to self-knowledge and the life of reason that Aristotle presents 

in Book VII. However, we do believe that there is good reason to think 

that the teaching of Book VII, understood as we have described, is a fitting 

introduction to Aristotle’s discussion of the possibility of friendship in Books 

VIII and IX and his account of the contemplative life as the best way of life in 

Book X, not only because both emerge as potential solutions to the problems


2 9 

made evident in Book VII, but also because the reader is meant to understand 

and even evaluate these solutions by way of the problems raised in 

Book VII. After Book VII, for instance, we are better placed to appreciate the 

importance of the suggestion in Book IX that having a friend who is another 

self would allow for self-perception (1170a27–b18), even as we consider the 

extent to which this solution (like the achievement of scientific knowledge) 

is possible for human beings, to consider how or whether it can be achieved 

without eviscerating the particulars of one’s friends in service of a thumotic 

desire for wholeness. We are likewise better situated to consider the meaning 

of Aristotle’s endorsement of living in accordance with what is most divine 

in us, “insofar as that is possible” (1177b34), and his exhortation that for a 

human being such a life is one “that accords with the intellect [nous], 33 if in 

fact this especially is a human being” (1178a8). 

33 

In Book VI, Aristotle connected prudence and nous, because both, contrary to scientific knowledge, 

were concerned with the ultimate particular (1143a1–1143b15).

3 0 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 42 / Issue 1

Reputation and Virtue 

3 1 

Reputation and Virtue: The Rhetorical Achievement 

of Socrates in Xenophon’s Apology 

K a z u ta k a Kon d o 

The Japan Society for the Promotion of Science 

kondoka@bc.edu 

Abstract: Scholars have long believed that Socrates’s aim in Xenophon’s Apology is simply 

to commit legal suicide. In order to escape decrepitude, Socrates is alleged to have invited 

death upon himself by provoking the jury. However, an analysis of Xenophon’s comments 

and Socrates’s conduct before the trial shows that Socrates’s primary purpose is to promote 

his reputation for virtue. In his official speech before the court, Socrates shifts the topic of the 

apology from the indictment to his various virtues, provocatively impressing his excellence 

upon the public. By using his peculiar rhetoric, megalēgoria, he skillfully forces the jury to 

demand capital punishment out of envy of his greatness rather than proof of his guilt. 

1. Introduction 

It is a well-known historical fact that Socrates was tried by the Athenian 

court in 399 BC and sentenced to death. Popular research on Xenophon’s 

account of this event suggests that Socrates, certain of his own innocence, 

committed legal suicide by intentionally provoking the jury in order to avoid 

the burdens of old age. 

The aim of this article is to reevaluate Socrates’s behavior at the trial 

in Xenophon’s Apology of Socrates to the Jury and to show that Socrates’s 

intention was in fact to promote his public reputation by rhetorically demonstrating 

that he was a man of virtue. Socrates was brought into the court 

This work was supported by Grant-in-Aid for JSPS Fellows. 



because his activity as a philosopher was believed to be harmful to the city. 

Socrates’s unusual defense mitigated the public’s hostility toward him by 

making the audience believe in his virtue. Through this tactic, he was aiming 

to preserve philosophy’s position in Athens after his death. The present 

study aims to clarify the notion of virtue that Socrates claimed to possess. It 

further explains how he employed a rhetorical technique called megalēgoria 

(literally, “big talk” or boasting) to attain a good reputation for himself and 

for philosophy via his death sentence. 

In recent scholarship on Socrates, the value of Xenophon’s works has 

often been underestimated. 1 The root of the popular neglect of Xenophon’s 

works is his alleged lack of comprehension for and appreciation of Socrates’s 

philosophy. It is commonly thought that Xenophon’s limited understanding—owed 

to the fact that he was, at most, a country gentleman—trivialized 

the teachings of Socrates. His Socrates is regarded as a banal moralist who 

merely repeats commonplace sermons. 2 

This view is reflected in the common interpretation of the Apology, 

according to which Xenophon’s Socrates preferred death to life before the 

trial began, because he was anticipating the burdens of old age. Hence, he 

intentionally brought about capital punishment by provoking the jury. 3 Here 

Xenophon’s account seems to focus on corporeal pleasure and pain, missing 

the core of Socratic philosophy. John Burnet attributes this misapprehension 

to the shallowness of Xenophon, who could not accept the forensic failure of 

his teacher or understand the philosophical depth of Socrates’s conduct. Burnet 

argues that Xenophon could not comprehend the loftiness of the Socratic 

1 

Robert C. Bartlett, editor’s introduction to Xenophon: The Shorter Socratic Writings (Ithaca, NY: 

Cornell University Press, 1996), 1–8. 

2 

John Burnet, Plato’s Phaedo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925), xii–xxxviii; Coleman Phillipson, 

The Trial of Socrates (London: Stevens, 1928), 26, 31; Anton-Hermann Chroust, Socrates, 

Man and Myth: The Two Socratic Apologies of Xenophon (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame 

Press, 1957), 1–16; W. K. C. Guthrie, Socrates (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 14–15; 

Victorino Tejera, “Ideology and Literature: Xenophon’s Defense of Socrates and Plato’s Apology,” in 

New Essays on Socrates, ed. Eugene Kelly (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984), 156; 

John M. Cooper, “Notes on Xenophon’s Socrates,” in Reason and Emotion: Essays on Ancient Moral 

Psychology and Ethical Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 4–9, 22; C. D. C. Reeve, 

ed., The Trials of Socrates (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2002), 177. Cf. Luis E. Navia, “A Reappraisal of 

Xenophon’s Apology,” in New Essays on Socrates, ed. Kelly, 47–48; Donald Morrison, “On Professor 

Vlastos’ Xenophon,” Ancient Philosophy 7 (1987): 9. 

3 

R. E. Allen, Socrates and Legal Obligation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), 35; 

Navia, “A Reappraisal of Xenophon’s Apology,” 59–62; Thomas C. Brickhouse and Nicholas D. Smith, 

Socrates on Trial (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 60–61; Cooper, “Notes on Xenophon’s 

Socrates,” 12.


3 3 

way of life—that is, Xenophon did not understand that Socrates’s devotion to 

philosophy as a divine mission would never allow him to commit suicide. The 

preferability of death to old age and infirmity was the answer that Xenophon 

finally arrived at in order to explain the tragic outcome of the trial. 4 Having 

made a similar point, W. K. C. Guthrie draws the harsh conclusion that 

Xenophon’s text “is of little or no independent value.” 5 

The present study offers two reasons against this interpretation of Xenophon’s 

Apology. First, although Xenophon seemed to admit that Socrates 

willingly accepted the verdict, Socrates’s primary purpose at the trial was 

not to commit suicide to avoid the burdens of old age but to promote his 

virtuous reputation. His boastful speech and attitude at the trial enabled him 

to achieve the paradoxical result of being sentenced to death because of his 

virtue. Socrates adopted an unusual rhetorical method, megalēgoria, in order 

to impress his virtue on the audience; such an impression of the virtue in 

accord with social custom would work as an antidote against the image of 

Socrates as someone who depreciated social values. The fact that the jury gave 

him the death sentence is evidence of their envy, and therefore evidence that 

they believed him to be virtuous or at least acknowledged his virtue. Second, 

Xenophon’s Socrates deliberately shaped his reputation by emphasizing the 

compatibility of his life with the common virtues of his fellow citizens. Thus, 

the radical independence of Socrates’s true philosophy was masked in order 

that he might appear to the public as a good and virtuous man. By examining 

the gap between how he wanted to appear and what he actually was, we will 

be able to see the rhetorical strategy Socrates employed in order to convince 

the Athenians that he was virtuous in a rather conventional sense of the term 

and that his philosophical activity, generally viewed as suspicious at best, was 

an acceptable and beneficial practice. 

In line with this suggestion, some commentators have argued that there 

would be another desirable end in Socrates’s acquiring the death sentence. 

Thomas Pangle observes that Socrates’s boastful attitude was primarily 

directed toward his follower Hermogenes (or people like him), who was 

respected by the public and who simultaneously sympathized with Socrates. 

Hermogenes’s narrative, which is marked by a favorable view of Socrates, 

portrays the philosopher as possessing a high-powered but respectable mind 

4 

John Burnet, Plato: Euthyphro, Apology of Socrates, and Crito (New York: Oxford University Press, 

1977), 145–46. Cf. Gregory Vlastos, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University 

Press, 1991), 292. 

5 

Guthrie, Socrates, 20.


and transmits this image to the entire city. Using this reputable defender, 

Socrates reconciled himself to the rest of society. 6 In addition, based on 

an analysis of the story of the Delphic oracle, Paul Vander Waerdt argues 

that Socrates’s speech aimed at defending his reputation for his own justice, 

“justice as benefaction.” To fulfill this aim, he based his defense speech on 

a peculiar view of justice, intending to instruct the jury and leave a lasting 

legacy after his death. This attitude is necessarily provocative owing to its 

unconventional character. 7 

Indeed, these considerations help us see Xenophon’s Apology in a different 

light. However, they do not sufficiently explicate the way in which 

Socrates’s speech enhanced his reputation among the audience at the trial. 

Pangle emphasizes the function of megalēgoria in satisfying the high-minded 

Hermogenes and compelling him to spread a favorable image of Socrates 

after the trial. He does not provide a substantial analysis of the contents of 

Socrates’s defense speech or the function of megalēgoria during the trial. 

Vander Waerdt focuses on the story of the oracle—a small but significant 

part of Socrates’s speech—to suggest that Socrates was making a case for his 

own interpretation of justice. The present article aims to revise their views, 

showing that Socrates’s boastful speech was primarily addressed to the public 

in order to foster a good and widespread reputation, not to teach his theory of 

justice. By changing his public image from “criminal” to “outstanding man of 

virtue,” Socrates was able to mitigate the citizens’ hostility toward philosophy 

and, to some degree, preserve its future in the city. Actually, some believed 

his claim (14). 8 Even those who were not convinced were forced to pay attention 

to Socrates’s virtue, and thus the focus was shifted away from Socrates’s 

guilt and the indictment (14–15, 32). It was his rhetoric that reconciled philosophy 

and the city, or at least brought the issue of his virtue by diverting 

their attention from the indictment. The trial gave him a unique opportunity 

to speak directly to the public. Megalēgoria was not used in a rational attempt 

to persuade the public of his virtue, but rather as a tool by which he was able 

to emotionally impress it upon them in a limited period of time. 9 

6 

Thomas L. Pangle, “On the Apology of Socrates to the Jury,” in Xenophon, ed. Bartlett, 19, 23–32. 

7 

Paul Vander Waerdt, “Socratic Justice and Self-Sufficiency: The Story of the Delphic Oracle in 

Xenophon’s Apology of Socrates,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 11 (1993): 1–48. 

8 

Parenthetical references are to Xenophon’s Apology. I use the Oxford edition of Xenophon’s text 

(Xenophontis Opera Omnia, vol. 2, ed. E. C. Marchant [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921]). All 

translations are my own. I also refer to Andrew Patch’s translation in Xenophon, ed. Bartlett. 

9 

According to Plato, Socrates knew that it was impossible for him to persuade people of his innocence 

or to eliminate the popular prejudice against him in a short time (Plato, Apology of Socrates


3 5 

This article will first critique the traditional view of legal suicide, following 

and revising the insights of Pangle and Vander Waerdt. It will take a 

careful look at Xenophon’s statements in order to demonstrate that Socrates’s 

purpose was to promote his reputation (section 2). It will also seek to substantiate 

this hypothesis by revealing Socrates’s intention as indicated by his 

own words in his conversation with Hermogenes (section 3). Then, departing 

from Pangle and Vander Waerdt, it will provide an analysis of Socrates’s 

rhetoric at the trial. The final section will examine the way in which Socrates 

rhetorically achieved his goal, especially by clarifying the kind of virtue he 

demonstrated and how he shaped his reputation (section 4). 

2. The Aim of Socrates and Xenophon’s Project 

With noted exceptions, most prominent scholars have asserted that the overriding 

aim of Xenophon’s Socrates was to attain a death sentence. However, a 

closer reading of Xenophon’s account of the trial suggests otherwise. It would 

appear that Socrates’s main aim was to promote his reputation as a virtuous 

man. He achieved this aim through the use of megalēgoria. Xenophon’s 

description of Socrates’s project in the Apology and a comparison between 

the Apology and the Memorabilia will substantiate this hypothesis. 

The very beginning of the Apology seems to be the most important. 

Xenophon begins, “It seems to me to be also worthwhile to recall how 

Socrates, when he was summoned to the court, deliberated concerning his 

defense speech and the end of his life” (1). Xenophon’s somewhat limited 

account aims to supplement the accounts of previous writers concerning a 

particular feature of Socrates’s conduct. According to Xenophon, they all 

mention Socrates’s use of megalēgoria but they do not clarify his purpose in 

using it. Therefore, Socrates’s behavior appears rather imprudent, as though 

he foolishly provoked the jury and carelessly invited his own death sentence. 

However, Xenophon contends that Socrates was successful in inviting his own 

death since, to his mind, death was already preferable to old age. Xenophon’s 

project in the Apology, then, is to demonstrate Socrates’s prudence in using 

megalēgoria, and he accomplishes this by revealing Socrates’s inner thought. 

However, Xenophon does not suggest that Socrates’s preference for death 

fully explains his use of megalēgoria. 10 On the contrary, Xenophon discloses 

18e5–19a7, 24a1–4, 37a5–b2). 

10 

Pangle, “On the Apology,” 22–23; Vander Waerdt, “Socratic Justice and Self Sufficiency,” 19–23.


that Socrates’s main purpose was not to induce the death penalty. After 

reporting Socrates’s official speech at the court, Xenophon inserts his view of 

Socrates’s intention: 

It was sufficient for me to make clear that Socrates considered it 

important above all things to appear neither impious regarding the 

gods nor unjust regarding human beings; he did not think that he 

should beg not to die, but he believed that it was time for him to die. 

(22–23, emphasis added) 

For Xenophon, Socrates’s primary aim was to foster a good reputation for virtue. 

Socrates deliberated about what kind of opinion people should have about 

him after his death. He clearly wished to achieve more than the end of his life. 11 

Moreover, the view that Socrates wanted to demonstrate his virtue 

better explains his use of megalēgoria than the theory of legal suicide. For 

megalēgoria would not be the most efficient means for Socrates to obtain the 

death sentence. Even if death had been his sole purpose in order to avoid 

decrepitude, why did he need death to come as a punishment? He would 

surely have had other means available to achieve this objective. According 

to Pangle, that megalēgoria and Socrates’s death are not as closely connected 

as they seem is further evidenced in the Memorabilia. In the last chapter of 

this work, Xenophon addresses almost the same subject as in the Apology but 

from a different perspective. 12 A comparison between the two texts shows 

that, in the latter, Xenophon does not have recourse to megalēgoria to explain 

Socrates’s death; megalēgoria appears only in the Apology. 

In the Memorabilia, Xenophon uses the reasonableness of Socrates’s 

death to do justice to Socrates’s claim about his daimonion. “Someone” might 

have thought that Socrates was lying about his daimonion because the daimonion, 

as Socrates’s protector, was supposed to save his life by indicating 

the future to him, but failed to do so. 13 However, this criticism assumes that 

death is to be avoided at all times. Xenophon argues against this presupposition, 

claiming that, for the old Socrates, death was already a good thing, and 

thus, the daimonion did not prevent him from attaining the good. Notably, 

11 

Dorion laments that the aim of Xenophon’s Socrates is commonly believed to be only legal suicide 

(Louis-André Dorion, “The Daimonion and the Megalēgoria of Socrates in Xenophon’s Apology,” 

Apeiron 38 [2005]: 133–35). For examples of this interpretation, see Burnet, Plato, 145–46; Allen, 

Socrates and Legal Obligation, 13, 35; Navia, “A Reappraisal of Xenophon’s Apology,” 56–58; Tejera, 

“Ideology and Literature,” 153; Vlastos, Socrates, 291–93. 

12 

Memorabilia 4.8. 

13 

Memorabilia 4.8.1


3 7 

when Xenophon insists that death was preferable for Socrates, he does not 

describe what Socrates said at the court; he mentions only the burdens of old 

age. Relatedly, Pangle points out, “Xenophon can explain that Socrates had 

decided to accept the death penalty without making any reference to his decision 

to indulge in big talk.” 14 Thus, Socrates’s megalēgoria cannot be explained 

as a necessary requirement of his professed desire to die before the onset of 

extreme old age. A wish to die does not require that one wish to be condemned 

and executed. Even if the trial had been unavoidable, megalēgoria would not 

have been the only means by which Socrates could choose to die legally. 15 

Conversely, megalēgoria features prominently in the Apology and is 

connected to virtue. 16 For “virtue” is an appropriate answer to the question: 

of what exactly did Socrates boast at the trial? If his only aim was to provoke 

the jury, he would have had options other than boasting. Xenophon’s 

understanding of Socrates’s megalēgoria thus necessitates the description of 

Socrates’s demonstration of virtue: the very function of megalēgoria was to 

publicly promote this virtue. 

In sum, the Apology clearly states, and an interpretation of the Memorabilia 

suggests, that Xenophon’s Socrates prioritized presenting his virtue 

over attaining the death sentence. Although this primary purpose is less 

than conspicuous, we cannot comprehend the deeper rationality behind 

his megalēgoria without appealing to it. In particular, we need to consider 

it in relation to the reason Socrates criticized the indictment and blamed 

the accusers and their fellows after the verdict had been reached (24–26). If 

Socrates intended only to die, we would not expect this behavior. Thus, his 

boastful behavior can be explained by his intention to demonstrate his virtue. 

3. The Conversation with Hermogenes 

In order to provide further evidence that Socrates’s primary purpose was to 

demonstrate his virtue, this section will examine the conversation that took 

14 

Pangle, “On the Apology,” 21. 

15 

Indeed, Socrates explained that execution is a good way for an old man to die (7). However, Pangle 

suggests that if Socrates aimed only to die, he could have offered a weak defense or simply refused 

to say anything in order to bring about a conviction; he did not behave in that way (Pangle, “On the 

Apology,” 22). In addition, Socrates’s preference for death is explained in the first eight or nine sections; 

if he did not have another purpose, the rest of the work would be unnecessary (Pangle, “On the 

Apology,” 21; cf. Vander Waerdt, “Socratic Justice and Self Sufficiency,” 21). Execution may be a better 

way of dying, but megalēgoria would not be a necessary requirement for attaining it. 

16 

Leo Strauss, Xenophon’s Socrates (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s, 1998), 139.


place between Socrates and Hermogenes before the trial. The argument on 

this point is important, because this conversation is traditionally believed 

to substantiate the theory of legal suicide. Let us criticize this interpretation 

based on Socrates’s own statements. 

Unlike Plato in his Apology, Xenophon presents one of Socrates’s private 

conversations in order to show that his conduct at the trial matched his intentions 

before the trial. Xenophon illustrates Socrates’s intention by employing 

a reporter who spoke directly with Socrates. Hermogenes gave a report about 

Socrates that makes it clear that Socrates’s megalēgoria was both intentional 

and reasonable. The rest of the work, including the scene of the trial, largely 

consists of this report. Xenophon tends not to depict Socrates directly confronting 

the jury and the Athenians, but presents him through the mouth of 

an associate who is sympathetic to Socrates. 17 

At first glance, Hermogenes’s report appears to substantiate the theory of 

legal suicide. Indeed, Socrates’s conversation with Hermogenes comes right 

after Xenophon’s opening statement that, for Socrates, death was already preferable 

to life (2). In addition, the desirability of death is strongly emphasized 

in the course of the conversation (6, 8). However, Socrates only defended death 

in his particular circumstances as a less undesirable option than the burdens 

of old age. Socrates’s deeper purpose, that is, the promotion of his reputation 

concerning virtue, is also present. Taking a closer look at the character of 

Hermogenes as well as at the overall structure of the conversation, we can see 

why the acceptability of death becomes so prominent: Socrates emphasized 

the topic that is acceptable for this particular interlocutor, Hermogenes. 

Before taking a closer look at the conversation, we need to delve deeper 

into the character of Hermogenes. Pangle observes that there was a kinship 

between Hermogenes and Socrates in such matters as poverty and unconventional 

morality. 18 Hermogenes’s personality, characterized by his serious 

morality and unique piety, 19 was a reaction to the conventional system of 

17 

Xenophon does not affirm the historical accuracy of Hermogenes’s report, even though he compares 

it with other sources. Cf. Cooper, “Notes on Xenophon’s Socrates,” 12. Hermogenes’s report is 

only used until the verdict is reached. After this, Xenophon uses other testimonies (23ff.). 

18 

Hermogenes was so poor that he needed other people’s help; for some reason, all of his father’s 

fortune went to Hermogenes’s elder brother Callias, who became famous for his great wealth (Memorabilia 

2.10; Plato, Cratylus 391b–c; Herodotus 6.121–22; Pangle, “On the Apology,” 25–26). 

19 

Hermogenes was pious, but he shared some unorthodox beliefs with Socrates. In particular, 

Hermogenes accepted Socrates’s daimonion as a genuine divinity, even though it seemed unorthodox 

to some people, like Socrates’s accusers (4–5). However, this does not mean that Hermogenes had 

any difficulty interacting with his fellow citizens. Unlike Euthyphro, he was not the sort of person


3 9 

values that held wealth and the law of religion in high regard. 20 His longing 

for true gentlemanliness replaced the wealth and social status he lacked. 

This kinship explains Hermogenes’s sympathy for Socrates. Notably, his 

ambivalent relationship to the common moral practices does not mean that 

Hermogenes had rebelled against the city. As Xenophon puts it, Hermogenes 

never “received blame.” 21 He was regarded as a man of “good intention.” At 

the same time, he took Socrates’s side. 22 Hermogenes was therefore both a 

supporter of Socrates and a safe, respectable reporter of Socrates’s conduct. 

However, although there was a kinship between Socrates and Hermogenes, 

as Pangle emphasizes, this does not mean that Hermogenes shared 

Socrates’s view in the trial. Actually, Hermogenes’s concern about Socrates’s 

strange attitude before the trial was what triggered the conversation between 

the two men in the first place. Upon seeing Socrates conversing about everything 

but the trial, Hermogenes implored him to consider what he would say 

in his defense speech. Socrates replied that he had lived caring for his apology. 

According to Socrates, doing nothing unjust is the noblest care of one’s 

defense. Socrates seemed to believe that demonstrating his way of life would 

be sufficient for his purposes. In other words, he did not intend to confront 

the charges directly. Hermogenes was not satisfied with this answer. He knew 

well that the Athenian judges often executed innocent men on account of 

their irksome speech, just as they also acquitted guilty men on account of 

their piteous and pleasing speech. Hermogenes believed that Socrates should 

persuade the judges of his innocence in the proper and ordinary way, as a 

good speech was essential for acquittal. Although caring for Socrates led Hermogenes 

to find the common legal practice defective, his advice to Socrates 

did not really go beyond convention. 

In order to defend his position to Hermogenes, Socrates deferred to his 

daimonion. He claimed that he had tried to consider his defense twice but his 

daimonion opposed him (4). Hermogenes, being a deeply pious man, found 

plausibility in Socrates’s argument but he was surprised; not because Socrates 

received the divine sign (which showed that he was blessed) or because 

who would accuse his own father in order to demonstrate his superiority as a pious man. In addition, 

unlike Socrates, he did not teach anything to people in order to make them similar to him. 

Hermogenes was modest, and his unorthodox ideas did not interfere with his social acceptance (Plato, 

Euthyphro 3b5–9). 

20 

Pangle, “On the Apology,” 26. 

21 

Memorabilia 1.2.48. Cf. Pangle, “On the Apology,” 27. 

22 

Memorabilia 2.10.3.


Socrates piously followed this sign. Hermogenes was puzzled because the 

daimonion opposed Socrates’s attempt to think about the defense speech (5). 

Being already familiar with the Socratic daimonion and having accepted its 

authority, he believed that being acquitted would be good for Socrates. Hence, 

he expected that the daimonion would protect Socrates. His surprise reveals 

that he assumed the goodness of both life and acquittal. By showing how he 

was different from Hermogenes and others who share this view, 23 Socrates 

was already preparing to make a persuasive case for himself. 

Socrates’s persuasion of Hermogenes also suggests important differences 

between them. Socrates’s statement that death seems good to the god “too” 

implies that god was not Socrates’s superior authority (5). For Socrates, the 

god merely happened to agree with him. Socrates seemed to believe that 

death in this particular circumstance was acceptable without having to be 

suggested by god. Furthermore, Socrates explicitly showed their difference by 

letting Hermogenes know of his decision; Socrates decided to abstain from 

planning his defense speech even though this almost certainly condemned 

him to death. Let us now consider how he defended this tactic to Hermogenes. 

Socrates began building his case for death by giving an account of his 

life. He contended that it was pleasant for him to know that he has lived his 

whole life piously and justly. He asserted that, in this respect, no one has 

lived a better life. Socrates already had a good reputation among the people 

who were close to him but he knew that, as his age advanced, his sight, hearing, 

learning abilities, and memory would decline. He preferred death, then, 

because the life that had once been pleasant was becoming unworthy to live. 24 

According to Socrates, the gods were right to prevent him from seeking 

the means for acquittal since old age is a cause of disease and grief, from which 

all kinds of hardships flow without cheerfulness. Socrates defended his failure 

to prepare for his speech to Hermogenes by arguing that the misery of old age 

should be avoided at any cost. This was an effective means of persuasion for 

23 

Xenophon assumes that readers of the previous writings on the Socratic trial share this assumption, 

which is the basis for their inference that Socrates, having failed to save himself, was irrational 

(1). Hermogenes’s assumption was arguably universal and, in this sense, he was representative of the 

common man. He even shared this assumption with an enemy of Socrates in the Memorabilia (4.8.1). 

Thus, persuading Hermogenes amounted to persuading people in general. 

24 

Socrates’s demonstration of the goodness of death was essentially a demonstration of the goodness 

of his life. The preference for death was conditional. When he was young, life was pleasant and good. 

Even now, life seemed pleasant to him. Socrates talked about the problem of old age as if it belonged 

to the future. It is also worth noting that for Xenophon, old age is not always disadvantageous (Gera, 

“Xenophon’s Socrates,” 38–39; Agesilaus 11.14–15; Education of Cyrus 8.7.1–28).


4 1 

Hermogenes since it directly countered his assumption that death is bad in 

itself while still giving credence to the divine authority Hermogenes trusted. 

Even if Socrates did not take the gods to be the final authority, a divine thing, 

Socrates’s daimonion, appeared to support his decision. 

From this, one may infer that in the conversation with Hermogenes, 

Socrates’s only purpose was to defend death for himself. However, the context 

suggests otherwise. Socrates’s purpose was not limited to escaping from 

the pain of old age—though his other purpose was, admittedly, less obvious. 

First, when Socrates referred to death, he was speaking not only from his own 

perspective but also from the point of view of others. According to Socrates, 

taking poison would be acceptable, since it would cause the most regret to 

his friends (7). He was certain that the death penalty would not damage his 

positive image. We have noted that, in Socrates’s view, he already had a good 

reputation among his associates for being virtuous and living a pleasant life. 

By dying in this particular manner, he believed that his good reputation 

would persist, and perhaps even be enhanced after his death. 

More importantly, Socrates ended the conversation by further qualifying 

his views about death. He directly indicated that inducing the death penalty 

was not his sole purpose. He says: 

As many beautiful things as I believe to have received from gods and 

human beings, and the opinion which I have concerning myself, if 

by displaying these things I vex the judges, then I will choose to die 

rather than to live longer in a slavish manner by begging to gain a 

much worse life instead of death. (9) 

This statement suggests that Socrates’s priority was to demonstrate his 

excellence rather than merely to die. He accepted the death penalty only 

as an unavoidable consequence of the demonstration of virtue. 25 Although 

Pangle suggests that Socrates’s attempts to make a favorable impression were 

directed primarily toward Hermogenes, Socrates clearly intended to display 

his excellence to the entire court. He was not entirely satisfied with having a 

good reputation among his companions (5), but felt the need to demonstrate 

his excellence to the general public, even if that meant annoying the jury. 

Therefore, contrary to appearances, the idea that Socrates sought only death 

in his apology should be abandoned. This last, brief indication in the conversation 

with Hermogenes further supports our suggestion: Socrates would 

25 

Cf. Strauss, Xenophon’s Socrates, 138.


promote his public reputation by demonstrating his virtuous life; as a result, 

he accepted the death penalty. 

Why does the issue of death appear more important than the demonstration 

of virtue? The answer has to do with the nature of Hermogenes’s 

question and his view of death. First, as we discussed, Socrates’s defense of 

death was a direct answer to Hermogenes’s question regarding Socrates’s failure 

to plan his speech; that is, Socrates did not prepare his speech, because 

death was acceptable to him. Second, and more fundamentally, the choice of 

topic seemed necessary for Socrates in order to converse with Hermogenes 

or people like him. It appeared unreasonable to them that Socrates would 

allow himself to be killed by fellow citizens as a result of his boastfulness. 

Thus, Socrates skillfully chose the topic and means of persuasion in order 

to eradicate their belief that death is always bad. In other words, Socrates 

wanted to show them the goodness of death in order that they might accept 

the reasonableness of the megalēgoria that led to his death. As a result, Hermogenes 

was persuaded. 

On the other hand, as it has been argued in this section, Socrates did not 

hide his main aim, that is, the demonstration of virtue by megalēgoria. However, 

it is not easy to see how Socrates achieved his aim, for how could a man 

who intentionally allowed himself to be found guilty of a capital crime establish 

a good reputation? In order to understand Xenophon’s Apology, we must 

consider the way in which Socrates promoted his reputation by megalēgoria 

even while being sentenced to death. 

4. The Rhetoric and Achievement of 

Socrates’s Official Speech 

Hermogenes then described Socrates’s speech, showing what he had accomplished 

at the trial. Pangle observes that Socrates’s boastful speech was 

primarily addressed to Hermogenes, who, inspired by his companion’s 

resoluteness, was expected to transmit to the public his favorable memory 

of Socrates. In contrast, let us analyze the effect of Socrates’s rhetoric on the 

jury and the public. Hermogenes, who had been persuaded in advance that 

death was good for Socrates, would have rationalized Socrates’s boastful 

speech and not been vexed by it. But the jury and the general audience were 

vexed by Socrates’s boastful attitude (9 and 14–15), and this provocation had 

a peculiar effect: to impress his virtue, and to secure his good reputation. 

How did megalēgoria contribute to this achievement?


4 3 

The interrogation of Meletus, which occupies a considerable part of 

the report of the trial, reveals the answer to this question. In an interrogation, 

a defendant typically confronts the indictment, aiming for acquittal. 

However, this did not happen in the case of Socrates. In the interrogation of 

Meletus, although Socrates initially appeared to object to the formal charges, 

he gradually shifted the topic to his superiority as a virtuous man. He never 

completed his defense. Socrates’s strategy was rather to make people envious 

of him by provocatively emphasizing his possession of virtue and other 

people’s lack of it. 

Socrates first took issue with the impiety charge, but he did not confront 

the charge straightforwardly. The first part of the accusation had it that 

Socrates did not believe in the gods in whom the city believed. His reaction 

was surprise and wonder. This is not necessarily tantamount to denial. 26 

Socrates’s surprise was due to the fact that most people had seen him sacrificing 

at the festivals and public altars. The validity of the impiety charge was 

questionable, because his pious activity was known to the public. However, as 

Leo Strauss points out, Socrates was silent on his private sacrifices. 27 One may 

then wonder if Socrates “performed this particular kind of act of piety only 

when he could be seen by everybody.” 28 In addition, a public act of piety does 

not establish Socrates’s belief in the gods, since one can perform a sacrifice 

without having faith. 29 Socrates’s defense of his belief did not effectively dispel 

the suspicion that Socrates did not believe in the orthodox gods of the city. 

His speech was already departing from a typical, straightforward apology 

aiming at directly refuting the charge. 

In addressing the second part of the impiety charge, according to which 

he introduced strange daimonia, Socrates increasingly diverged from the 

normal objective of a defense speech. Professing that he had some kind of 

a personal god or daimonion, Socrates described this as a sort of sound 

he received, and pointed out the similarity between this and other divine 

sounds or voices commonly accepted to be messengers of the gods by his 

fellow citizens: the cry of birds, the sound of thunder, and the voice of the 

priestess in Delphi. In spite of this similarity, Socrates considered himself 

more pious than other people. While for others, the messengers of the gods 

26 

Xenophon starts his own defense of Socrates with a similar expression (Memorabilia 1.1.1). 

27 

Strauss, Xenophon’s Socrates, 130. In the Memorabilia, Xenophon mentions Socrates’s sacrifices at 

home (1.1.2). 

28 

Strauss, Xenophon’s Socrates, 130. 

29 

Cf. Strauss, Xenophon’s Socrates, 4–5.


were “birds, sayings, voices, and prophets,” Socrates called his messenger the 

daimonion, that is, something divine. 30 Socrates’s proof of the truthfulness 

of his claim was that whenever he conveyed the counsels of the god to his 

friends, they never turned out to be false. Socrates was not only more pious, 

but also more blessed than other people. 

This argument was clearly not a direct answer to the impiety charge. For 

the formal charge was that Socrates did not believe in “the gods of the city.” 

In response, Socrates pointed out his similarity with “all people,” not particularly 

with his fellow citizens; thus, his piety seems to be the highest common 

denominator among Greeks or human beings in general. Instead of attempting 

to directly refute the charge, Socrates boasted that he was more pious and 

blessed than his fellow Athenians, which might be taken to imply that their 

view of the gods was wrong or insufficient. Hence, he failed to address the 

charge that he did not believe in the orthodox gods of the Athenians. 

Having apparently refuted the impiety charge, Socrates shifted his locus 

of concern to the demonstration of his outstanding piety. Hermogenes made 

this clear. According to him, the judges, upon hearing Socrates’s statement, 

started making a great deal of noise (14). Some of them clamored because 

they were envious that Socrates received greater things from the gods. Others 

clamored because they did not believe that Socrates was more blessed than 

they were. Socrates had successfully shifted the issue from the questioning of 

his impiety to the questioning of his blessedness. This infuriated the jury, but 

their clamor was also evidence of their envy. Socrates, “by extolling himself 

at the court, [brought] envy upon himself” (32). 

Socrates’s reaction to the clamor of the jury was even more provocative. 

According to him, when Chaerephon asked Apollo about Socrates before the 

many, he received the answer that no human being was more liberal, more 

just, and more moderate than Socrates (14). 31 Thus, Socrates became more 

boastful, for he increased the number of his virtues by making use of direct 

divine authority. Socrates had initially set out to prove his piety, but here 

he enumerated three additional virtues: liberality, justice, and moderation. 

Socrates told the story of the oracle aiming at a specific type of person, that 

is, the type that did not wish to believe in Socrates’s blessedness (14). Since 

30 

In this respect, too, Socrates differed from Hermogenes, who called the messengers “voices, 

dreams, and birds” (Symposium 4.48). 

31 

This story does not establish his belief in Apollo, the god of Delphi, for there is no mention that 

Socrates sent Chaerephon there. Apollo is also silent about piety as a Socratic virtue (Strauss, Xenophon’s 

Socrates, 131–32).


4 5 

boastfulness was intimately connected with the demonstration of his virtue, 

it seemed necessary to him to be more boastful in order to make more people 

envious of his excellence. 

Naturally, Socrates’s response to the clamor of the jury caused even 

more clamor (15). Since the jury’s reaction was against his claim to excellence, 

Socrates had succeeded in directing the attention of a greater number 

of people to his virtue, and away from the original accusation against him. 

Confronting the agitated jury, Socrates pretended to appease but effectively 

provoked them further by saying that the god of Delphi said greater things 

to Lycurgus than it did to him. The story has it that when Lycurgus went to 

the temple, the god addressed him thus: “I’m considering whether I should 

call you a god or a human being” (15). Socrates admitted that he could not 

compete with the founder of the enemy city, since the god did not compare 

Socrates to a deity. According to Socrates, the jury was overreacting, since 

Socrates was not claiming godlike status, only that he far surpassed ordinary 

human beings (15). In the oracle, the god did not explicitly say that Socrates 

was superior to other human beings, but only that no one exceeded him in 

the virtues mentioned (the oracle may have meant that Socrates and others 

are equally virtuous). However, Socrates interpreted this in the most boastful 

way. His provocative interpretation of the oracle forced the jury to pay attention 

to the issue of his excellence. 

Socrates’s attempt to offer evidence for his virtue took this a step further. 

He claimed that he was continent, because he was not enslaved to pleasures 

of the body; he was liberal, because he did not receive any gifts or wages from 

others; he was just, because he was satisfied with his present possessions and 

did not need the possessions of others; and he was wise, because he never 

ceased seeking and learning whatever good thing he could since the very 

time he began to understand (16). In the oracle, the god had attributed three 

virtues to Socrates: liberality, justice, and moderation (14). Socrates enumerated 

four: continence, liberality, justice, and wisdom (16). Boastful Socrates 

seemed to think that he was virtuous in a different and greater way than the 

god thought. 32 

32 

His deviation from the oracle indicates that wisdom could be acquired through a philosophical 

quest for good, indicating that Socrates’s virtue came from his philosophical activity. In this way, 

Socrates’s reputation was inextricably linked to that of philosophy and his defense amounts to a 

defense of philosophy. But importantly, he never emphasized the fact that he was a philosopher in the 

course of his speech, probably because philosophy as such was on trial. Refraining from arguing that 

philosophical inquiry is worth doing, Socrates rather chose a strategy that would demonstrate his 

customary virtue to the ordinary people. In short, he made himself appear harmless.


Based on his argument concerning the impiety charge, Socrates concluded 

not that his orthodox piety was effectively proved, but that he should 

be praised by both gods and human beings (18). Socrates began his apology 

by allegedly attempting a refutation of the impiety charge, but his conclusion 

was that he was a man of great honor, an honor that stemmed from his 

virtue. Instead of a defense, Socrates offered a provocative demonstration of 

his virtue. 

Socrates moved on to argue against the corruption charge. His response 

had a similar logic to that of his response to the impiety charge. Here again, 

Socrates diverged from the official charge in order to demonstrate his virtue. 

At first, Socrates and Meletus had different understandings of corruption. 

On one hand, Socrates asserted that the meaning of corruption was 

known to the ordinary man: 

turning from a pious man into an impious man, from a moderate man 

into a hubristic man, from living a temperate life to living an extravagant 

life, from being a moderate drinker into a drunkard, and from 

being a lover of toil into a soft person, or yielding to some other base 

pleasure. (19) 

Based on this understanding, Socrates attempted to ask Meletus about the 

men whom he (Socrates) had allegedly corrupted. However, without naming 

a particular individual, Meletus raised a different issue: Socrates persuaded 

the young to obey him rather than their parents (20). Meletus had a different 

understanding of the notion of corruption, cherishing parental authority, 

the traditional way of education, and, generally, the nomos of the city. For 

Meletus, Socrates was a menace to the ordinary way of citizen life. 

Based on Meletus’s account, Socrates skillfully established his customary 

virtue. He did not object to Meletus’s formulation as such, but agreed 

with him “concerning education at least” (20). According to Socrates, it was 

widely accepted that one should obey experts rather than one’s relatives. For 

example, in matters of health, people should obey doctors; in the assembly, 

those who speak most sensibly; and in war, generals who were elected 

owing to their good military sense. Socrates thus appealed to the convention 

of the Athenians, and Meletus agreed on this point by saying that this was 

“advantageous and customary” (20). It was surprising, Socrates claimed, that 

he—who was held to be the best concerning the greatest good for human 

beings, namely, education—was being prosecuted on a capital charge (21). In 

light of his response to the impiety charge, Socrates appeared to be a great


4 7 

educator from the customary point of view of the ordinary people (21; cf. 11). 

Once again, Socrates was not so much concerned with refuting the charge as 

with demonstrating his excellence. This marks the end of the second part of 

the interrogation. 

Socrates effectively and provocatively demonstrated his excellence, while 

neglecting to offer an effective defense against the charges. But it does not 

follow that Socratic virtue was the virtue of the common citizen, as is often 

supposed. 33 As indicated in the argument against the impiety charge, the 

peculiarity of Socratic virtue was marked by the fact that Socrates neglected 

to prove the orthodoxy of his piety and, in order to explain his notion of virtue, 

he explicated his disagreement with the gods. Socrates was more virtuous 

than the god claimed (14–16). Moreover, both Athenians and foreigners who 

were seeking to cultivate their virtue wished to associate with him over anyone 

else. Many of these people offered him gifts as tokens of their gratitude 

(17). Socratic virtue had a widespread reputation among both the Athenians 

and foreigners. In short, Socrates’s virtue was universal, not limited to the 

ethics of his local citizenry. 

An important peculiarity of Socrates’s notion of virtue was that it did 

not contribute to the common good of the local city. When the city of Athens 

was besieged by Sparta at the end of the Peloponnesian War, Socrates faced 

no greater difficulties than in a time of peace and prosperity (18). His life 

was independent of politics. Even during intense wartime, when the Athenians 

were on the verge of defeat, Socrates enjoyed a pleasant life (cf. 5), for 

he derived his pleasure not from the marketplace as others did, but from his 

own soul without cost. Socrates’s (private) virtues did not relate to the public 

affairs of Athens. Rather, they were inextricably related to the independence 

of an individual. 34 This may explain why courage was not included in the 

list of the Socratic virtues: it is difficult to be courageous in private. He was 

regarded as a virtuous man by some people and he was respected for that 

reason, but he failed to prove that he was as good a citizen as his fellows. 

Also, the nature of the Socratic education was not without its problems. 

Whereas the purposes of the doctor (health), of the good speaker (the public 

good), and of the general (victory) are clear, the purposes of the Socratic 

education were not clear. What kind of education did Socrates provide to 

33 

See note 2. Xenophon’s Socrates may represent the whole picture of philosophical activity including 

its unconventional aspects, and then attempt to attract the young people who are interested in 

philosophy. Cf. Pangle, “On the Apology,” 30–31. 

34 

Pangle, “On the Apology,” 36–37. Cf. Apology 3; Memorabilia 4.8.4.


the young? How did his education foster good citizens? As Aristophanes’s 

Clouds suggests, it seems that the Socratic education of the young did not 

always make better citizens. That is to say, even if they became wise, their 

parents and the general population may still have regarded them as corrupt. 

Yet Socrates considered education to be the greatest good for human beings 

(21). Socratic virtue was not necessarily tied to the public good, and hence, 

one may object that the direction of his education was questionable, especially 

in terms of politics. 35 

Despite the somewhat problematic nature of Socratic virtue, his rhetoric 

never made him appear guilty or depraved. To the contrary, Socrates’s 

piety appeared to have been affirmed by the Delphic god, and he appeared 

to be a good educator of the young. Indeed, Socrates discreetly indicated the 

problematic character of his virtue, for instance through his disagreement 

with the god, and its extraordinary character. But he made people believe 

that he was more virtuous than the average citizen, making that claim from 

the horizon in common with them, such as the normal practice of piety and 

the popular notion of education. We can now understand why Xenophon 

describes Socrates’s primary purpose with this modest expression: Socrates 

attempted to appear neither impious nor unjust (22). Socrates’s purpose was 

not only to demonstrate his virtue, but also to make people believe that his 

excellence was compatible with the common understanding of virtue by 

appealing to the authority of the gods and to the common practices of the 

ordinary people. He never directly refuted the prejudice against philosophy 

nor taught the true nature of philosophy as a lofty activity which was unfamiliar 

to the ordinary people, but he rendered himself and his profession 

“customary” (cf. 20). 

Socrates’s megalēgoria was essential for this achievement. His boastful 

speech emphasized his superiority from the common people’s perspective by 

taking the common practice of piety and education as examples. As a result, 

his questionable quality as a citizen was less conspicuous. The presentation 

of virtue was successful in diverting people’s attention away from the formal 

charges and making them envious or angry, so much so that they convicted 

him and condemned him to death. 

As Xenophon explains, Socrates was sentenced to death because the 

jury envied him (32). It makes little sense to say that they envied him for his 

guilt. The object of the jury’s envy or anger was his excellence, made manifest 

35 

Vander Waerdt, “Socratic Justice and Self-Sufficiency,” 44–45; Pangle, “On the Apology,” 36–37.


4 9 

through his conduct at the trial. Socrates was convicted not because he was 

an impious criminal, but because he was envied for being greatly blessed, 

just, liberal, continent, and wise. Others did not believe that he was a man 

of virtue (14) but they voted for the capital punishment because they were 

provoked by his boastful claims to virtue, not because they regarded him as a 

criminal according to the indictment. Socrates thus made himself a virtuous 

man for some, and a contentious braggart for others. His rhetoric made the 

trial a stage for demonstrating virtue, and the verdict and solemn acceptance 

of death (27, 33–34) proofs for it. In this sense, his speech was successful. 36 

The kind of reputation established by this rhetoric is indicated by 

Socrates’s utterance after the interrogation. After the official speech before 

the court, Socrates declared: 

It is testified to by the future and the past that I never committed 

injustice, nor made anyone more wicked, but that I benefited those 

conversing with me by teaching whatever good thing I could. (26) 

Socrates believed that his project to enhance the reputation of his virtue 

would be successful. However, after the trial, he no longer had to limit the 

reach of his reputation to those who were close to him or to those seeking to 

be virtuous (5–7). His reputation would spread among a greater number of 

the people. This was not the highest praise that Socrates could acquire, since 

the future would not testify that his life was “very pleasant” or most virtuous 

(5, 7, and 17), yet he seemed to be satisfied with having a wide but shallow 

reputation among most people in the future (26). It is this sort of reputation 

that Socrates tried to establish at the trial: he was satisfied with acquiring a 

moderately good but widespread reputation. 

5. Conclusion 

The present investigation suggests the following two points. First, Socrates’s 

primary goal at his trial was to ensure a good reputation for himself among 

the audience by portraying himself as a virtuous man. His unusual rhetorical 

method, megalēgoria, contributed to this goal. Socrates did not wish only 

to die in order to escape the burdens of the old age. Second, Xenophon’s 

36 

Moreover, the memorability of Socrates’s boastful speech would provide the people with the future 

opportunity to regret their reckless decision and reconsider Socrates’s appeal for his excellence. For, as 

Xenophon puts it, anger makes people “do the things which [they] necessarily [regret] later” (On the 

Art of Horsemanship 6.13). As for the psychological mechanism of anger, see also Aristotle, Rhetoric 

1382a3–19.


Socrates had a radically individualistic virtue seemingly incompatible with 

common moral practice. His rhetoric was extremely selective, emphasizing 

certain aspects of this virtue, and subtly implying that others did not share it, 

according to what he knew about common Athenian morality. His conduct 

at the trial was guided by the desire to achieve a great reputation, and to be 

envied by the common people. Even though he was ultimately executed, the 

focus of the verdict was his virtue, not his guilt. 

However, Socrates’s rhetorical achievement only partially reflected his 

true nature. Xenophon concludes his work by praising Socrates. He writes, 

“When I consider the wisdom and nobility of the man, I cannot help but. . . 

praise him” (34). Xenophon praises Socrates not for his “piety” and “justice,” 

which Socrates demonstrated at the trial (1, 22), but because of his “wisdom” 

and “nobility.” Piety and justice are not the qualities that elicit Xenophon’s 

greatest applause, but they are good enough to be demonstrated in Xenophon’s 

work (22). What Socrates achieved in court was less than his achievements 

during the rest of his life. But as Xenophon notes at the beginning of the 

Apology, this made Socrates’s conduct at his trial more important, since he 

now deliberated about “his defense and the end of his life” (1). Socrates, as 

a philosopher, was initially presented at his trial as an impious corrupter of 

the young, but his speech turned him into an outstanding man of virtue. 

Socrates’s rhetoric affected the image that people had of him, and was the reason 

for his death. Indeed, he was sentenced to death because he provocatively 

bragged about his virtue. As he predicted, displaying his opinion about his 

virtue, not the indictment itself, was the reason for his execution (9). 

Socrates’s rhetoric seems not to be a product of selfish motivation. In the 

Memorabilia, Xenophon defines Socratic justice as benefiting others. 37 The 

Apology presents Socrates not only demonstrating his compatibility with the 

common ethics, but also practicing his own justice. It is true that his rhetoric 

would provide him with some consolation before his execution, because it 

would be better for him to die with the expectation that his good reputation 

would be secured (7, 26). However, more than that, his rhetoric would 

benefit others who practiced philosophy after Socrates. Taking advantage of 

the audience’s emotional response, Socrates was able to overcome his philosophy’s 

negative reputation and secure its future in Athens at the expense of 

his own life. His peculiar rhetoric was adopted on the only occasion he could 

appeal to the public in his old age. 

37 

Memorabilia 4.8.11.

On “The Literary Character of the Guide for the Perplexed”: Aporia and Euporia 

5 1 

On “The Literary Character of the Guide for 

the Perplexed”: Aporia and Euporia 

M ic h a e l M i l l e r m a n 

University of Toronto 

Michael.millerman@mail.utoronto.ca 

Abstract: This article argues that Leo Strauss’s essay “The Literary Character of the Guide for 

the Perplexed” presents the Guide as a work of political philosophy and is itself such a work. 

Sections I–III explore the contradiction in Strauss’s essay between his insistent claim that the 

Guide is not a philosophical book and his evidence to the contrary, examine Strauss’s Aristotelian 

epigraph in light of that contradiction, and discuss additional passages supporting 

the thesis. The final section postulates the identity of political philosophy and enlightened 

kalam in Strauss’s essay. 

I 

Leo Strauss’s essay “The Literary Character of the Guide for the Perplexed” 

aims to discover the science to which Maimonides’s Guide belongs, indicate 

the peculiar manner in which it is written, clarify the reasons for this manner 

of presentation, elaborate the methods by which a reader can approach 

the science of the Guide despite its obscurity, and, finally, establish the correct 

relationship between the Guide and Maimonides’s Mishneh Torah. These 

aims ought to be considered in light of the fact that Strauss’s essay is included 

I would like to extend my gratitude to the editor and the three anonymous reviewers, whose comments 

on earlier drafts of this paper were tremendously helpful, and to Kenneth Hart Green for his 

generous and encouraging feedback and support. 



in a collection of essays, Persecution and the Art of Writing. 1 As Strauss indicates 

in the “Preface” to Persecution, the essays collected there, and hence 

also his essay on the Guide, all deal with “the problem of the relation between 

philosophy and politics.” Moreover, according to the “Introduction,” the 

topic of Persecution is “the sociology of philosophy” (7), which has but one 

task: to understand the danger posed to philosophy by politics (21). Before 

the reader even begins to consider the specific content of Strauss’s essay on 

the Guide, then, he or she already knows about it that it deals with the problematic, 

dangerous relationship between philosophy and politics. 2 How does 

this problem bear on the aims of Strauss’s essay? 

The Guide is not a philosophic book. Strauss makes and emphasizes this 

point more than once (42–46). 3 He does so based on the discovery that the 

subject matter of the Guide is “enlightened kalam”—the defense of the fundamental 

tenets of a religious code of law 4 —or the secrets of the Torah, or the 

explanation of the Account of the Beginning and the Account of the Chariot, 

or the demonstration of the identity of these two accounts with physics and 

metaphysics; none of these is the province of the philosopher qua philosopher 

(38–46). 

Moreover, Strauss indicates that Maimonides excludes from the Guide 

all the parts of philosophy recognized by Maimonides himself: mathematics, 

physics, metaphysics, ethics, economics, “government of the city,” and 

“government of the great nation or nations” (43–44). Accordingly, “we are led 

to the conclusion that no philosophic topic of any kind is, as such, the subject 

matter of the Guide” (45). 

1 

Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 

Parenthetical references in text are to this work. Hillel Fradkin, “A Word Fitly Spoken,” in Leo Strauss 

and Judaism: Jerusalem and Athens Critically Revisited, ed. David Novak (Lanham, MD: Rowman & 

Littlefield, 1996), 61, mentions the importance of situating Strauss’s essay in the context of the general 

themes of Persecution and the Art of Writing, but only briefly and in passing, in the space of less than a 

single paragraph. 

2 

Kenneth Seeskin tacitly rejects the idea that the dangerous relationship between philosophy and 

politics, i.e., the main theme of Persecution and the Art of Writing, necessitates Maimonides’s “deep” 

or intentional esotericism, as opposed to the mere “esotericism” of difficult ideas, when he writes as 

follows: “if persecution was a factor in his literary career, he did not show much sign of it. We must 

therefore ask why he needed a deeper level of [intentional] esotericism” (Seeskin, “Maimonides’ Conception 

of Philosophy,” in Leo Strauss and Judaism, ed. Novak, 102). For Seeskin, the character of the 

Guide is better understood with reference to the theme of the limits of human reason rather than that 

of man and the community, philosophy and law. 

3 

As Kenneth Green, Leo Strauss on Maimonides: The Complete Writings (Chicago: University of 

Chicago Press, 2013), 50, notes parenthetically, this is “a point he curiously repeats thrice in five 

paragraphs.” 

4 

See section IV below for a discussion of this term.


5 3 

Finally, Strauss supports his contention with quotations from Maimonides 

that show that Maimonides identifies philosophy almost exclusively with 

“the teaching as well as the methods of Aristotle…and of the Aristotelians,” 

to which he is opposed, or of which he is “an adversary” (42). Maimonides 

distinguishes “the community of the adherents of the law” from “the philosophers” 

as mutually exclusive. “Since he himself is an adherent of the law,” 

Strauss contends,” he cannot possibly be a philosopher, and consequently a 

book of his in which he explains his views concerning all important topics 

cannot possibly be a philosophic book” (43). These are the three main arguments 

Strauss adduces against the claim that the Guide is a philosophic book. 

The Guide is not a philosophic book. Yet, on the basis of “the general 

principle underlying his entire work and nowhere contradicted by him, 

that knowledge of the truth is absolutely superior in dignity to any action,” 

Strauss concludes that the Guide is “absolutely superior in dignity” (92), for 

Maimonides, to the Mishneh Torah, Maimonides’s eminently political compilation, 

a code of law, of precepts, “addressed to the general run of men” (94). 

If, then, the Guide is not strictly speaking and exclusively a political text, nor 

strictly speaking and exclusively a philosophical text, Strauss gives us reason 

to suspect that it is a work of political philosophy, a work partaking of both 

the political and the philosophical, in that it presents the philosophical in the 

garb of, under the aegis of, and for the defense of the political. 

This suggestion is met with the objection that “there is practically complete 

agreement among the students of Maimonides that [the Guide] is not 

devoted to political science” (44). However, the objection can be overcome 

on two grounds. In his examination of the arguments meant to establish 

the superiority of the Mishneh Torah to the Guide, Strauss rejects as “wholly 

immaterial” and possessing “no validity whatsoever” those arguments that 

“do not reflect Maimonides’ own conviction, but deal exclusively with what 

other people thought, or think of the matter” (80). The argument from agreement 

among students of Maimonides concerning his teaching is precisely 

such an argument. Second, Strauss claims that “the secret doctrine” of the 

Guide cannot be understood without the synthesis “in a sense” of “philosophy 

and politics” (58). Why would an adequate understanding of the secrets 

of the Law or the Torah require a synthesis, so to speak, of philosophy and 

politics if not because the problem of the Law is a problem ultimately of 

political philosophy or political science? 

What is more, by the end of the Guide, as Strauss indicates, the “true 

science of the Law” is identified with “wisdom,” rather than with “the science


of the Torah,” the “legalistic study of the law.” Apparently, then, the last word 

of the Guide is that its subject matter is wisdom; i.e., the subject matter of 

philosophy as such (90–93). 

Consistent with its placement in Persecution and the Art of Writing, 

therefore, the Guide is above all concerned with the relationship between 

philosophy and politics, i.e., with the science that studies this relationship, 

political science or political philosophy, a branch of philosophy proper. 5 

The Guide, then, is and is not a philosophic book. 6 But although Strauss 

is emphatic, more so than any previous interpreter of Maimonides, that 

“contradictions are the axis of the Guide” (74), he does not mention explicitly 

among the contradictions of the Guide that it is and is not a philosophic 

book. In other words, this is a contradiction that belongs as least as much to 

Strauss’s essay as it does to Maimonides’s Guide. 7 

Why does Strauss’s essay on the Guide, meant to elucidate the Guide 

for its modern readers and for the sake of the study of “the history of Judaism 

and the history of medieval philosophy” (38, 56), contradict itself on 

a point of such importance? Strauss discusses this problem in section 4 of 

his essay, “A Moral Dilemma.” The dilemma consists in this: Maimonides 

explicitly asks his readers not to divulge the Guide’s secret teaching (54–55). 

5 

Leo Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 

1959), 9–55. Of course, it is not first of all concerned with “politics” in general, but with the Jewish 

community and Jewish law specifically—as is fitting for a work of this kind, which does not stand with 

both feet in philosophy, but with one in philosophy and the other in the law. Ultimately, however, its 

theme is the general one. 

6 

See Heinrich Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem (Cambridge: Cambridge University 

Press, 2007), 23n32, for the view that the rejection of the philosophical character of the Guide 

is at least in part exoteric, i.e., decent and respectful. As Strauss states in his essay on Halevi’s Kuzari, 

also in Persecution (115): 

The religious indifference of the philosopher knows no limits: he does not oppose to the errors of the positive 

religions the religion of reason; he does not demand that a philosopher who as such no longer believes 

in the religion of his fathers, should reveal his religious indifference, proceeding from unbelief, by openly 

transgressing the laws of that religion. …He considers it perfectly legitimate that a philosopher who as 

such denies Divine revelation, adheres to Islam for example, i.e., complies in deed and speech with the 

requirements of that religion and therefore, if an emergency arises, defends that faith which he cannot but 

call the true faith, not only with the sword, but with arguments, viz., dialectical arguments, as well. The 

philosopher certainly does not say, or imply, that a genuine philosopher would necessarily openly reject 

any other religion or law in favor of the rational nomoi composed by the philosophers or of “the religion of 

the philosophers,” although he does admit that under certain circumstances he might. 

See also the characterization of the first chapters of the Guide, and presumably not only them, as “a 

legal justification of philosophy” (20) and the discussion of this question in the essay on Spinoza (182). 

7 

See Steven Lenzner, “A Literary Exercise in Self-Knowledge: Strauss’s Twofold Interpretation of 

Maimonides,” Perspectives on Political Science 31, no. 4 (2002): 231–32, for a discussion of other Maimonidean 

methods at work in Strauss’s essay.


5 5 

Maimonides himself was under a legal obligation not to divulge the secret 

or esoteric teaching of the Torah (46–55), for which reason he had to present 

that teaching using contradictory speech (68–69). That is, Maimonides wrote 

an esoteric interpretation of an esoteric teaching. And he forbade his own 

interpreters from interpreting his interpretation openly. 

Therefore, Strauss’s own interpretation of the Guide is to a certain extent 

esoteric—to what extent, we do not know. 8 Yet it is not for that reason more 

obscure than the Guide: “It is merely a popular fallacy to assume that such 

an explanation is an esoteric work of the [third] power, or at least [thrice] as 

esoteric, and consequently [thrice] as difficult to understand as is the esoteric 

text itself.” After all, “any explanation, however esoteric, of a text is intended 

to be helpful for its understanding; and, provided the author is not a man of 

exceptional inability, the explanation is bound to be helpful” (60). Strauss 

says this of Maimonides’s esoteric interpretation of the esoteric teaching of 

the Torah; it applies equally well to Strauss’s interpretation of Maimonides. 

Strauss also maintains that “if by the help of Maimonides, we understand 

the esoteric teaching of the Bible, we understand at the same time the esoteric 

teaching of the Guide, since Maimonides must have accepted the esoteric 

teaching of the law as the true teaching” (60). It would be careless in a longer 

analysis of Strauss’s essay to leave the latter half of that assertion uncontested; 

it is enough here to raise the question whether the arrow runs the other way. 

Do we understand the esoteric teaching of the Bible by understanding the 

Guide, as Maimonides intended us to do, according to Strauss? If so, do we 

also understanding the esoteric teaching of the Guide by understanding the 

esoteric interpretation of that teaching, Strauss’s? 

Does Strauss’s interpretation aim to present the heart of the teaching of 

the Guide? It is necessary to repeat in full a comment by Strauss we have 

referred to previously. After rejecting the possibility that the historians of 

his time possess any of the prerequisites for understanding the Guide mentioned 

by Maimonides himself, Strauss advances the argument that the 

8 

It is by now becoming commonplace that Strauss wrote esoterically on Maimonides, though Kenneth 

Green refers to this view, as it concerns “The Literary Character,” more as a temptation than an 

established fact: “Some might…be tempted to think that in the complex construction of this essay, 

Strauss is actually instructing by example, and so is attempting to imitate Maimonides, offering a hint 

about his own views” (Leo Strauss on Maimonides, 31). For an excellent account of this practice in 

Strauss’s introductory essay to the Guide, see Aryeh Tepper, Progressive Minds, Conservative Politics: 

Leo Strauss’s Later Writings on Maimonides (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013). 

Andrew Patch, “Leo Strauss on Maimonides’ Prophetology,” Review of Politics 66, no. 1 (2004): 84n2, 

has a list of scholars who “all suggest that Strauss himself imitated Maimonides’ esotericism in some 

degree in his own commentaries on the Guide.”


Guide may perhaps be understood “by the collaboration of many, in particular 

of Arabists, Judaists, and students of the history of philosophy,” though 

Maimonides never mentioned these disciplines and “thought very slightly of 

history in general” (57). 

In this context, Strauss makes the following statement: “in all justice it 

may be said that [Maimonides] did not know, and could not know history in 

the modern sense of the word, a discipline which, in a sense, provides the synthesis, 

indispensable for the adequate understanding of the secret doctrine, of 

philosophy and politics” (58). This synthesis, the most natural form of which 

is the teaching of classical political philosophy (that is why modern historical 

research only provides the requisite synthesis “in a sense”; the true synthesis 

is understood correctly only by classical political philosophy) is indispensable 

for the understanding of the Guide. It is the theme to which Strauss’s “sociology 

of philosophy” is dedicated (7–8, 21), the guiding theme of the essays in 

Persecution, in which volume Strauss agreed to have his essay printed. 9 

It becomes possible to say, then, that Strauss indicates that the secret 

doctrine of the Guide is a philosophic teaching—with its own perplexities, to 

be sure 10 —presented in such a way as to minimize the “danger” philosophic 

teachings pose to legal or political communities, as is consistent with the fact 

that it is addressed “to the small number of people who are,” on one hand, 

“able to understand by themselves” (94) and who are, on the other, under the 

Law or, as Strauss puts it in the introduction to Persecution, who live at a time 

when “some political or other orthodoxy [is] enforced by law or custom” (32). 

Perhaps it was necessary for Strauss first to deny and then implicitly to 

affirm that the Guide is a philosophic book in order to combat the “necessarily 

confused notion” of what a philosopher is, which, when clarified, leads to 

“what seems to be the most serious implication of the question…the relation 

of philosophy to social or political life” (95). Only by denying that the Guide is 

a philosophic book, a claim that had been taken for granted by the scholars of 

Strauss’s time and before, could Strauss restore the distance needed to appreciate 

the difficulties involved in the problem of “the relation of philosophy to 

social or political life” and to adequately assume the “foremost task” of the 

9 

“In every attempt at harmonization,” Strauss once wrote, speaking of philosophy and revelation, 

“in every synthesis however impressive, one of the two opposed elements is sacrificed, more or less 

subtly but in any event surely, to the other” (quoted in Kenneth Green, Jew and Philosopher: The 

Return to Maimonides in the Jewish Thought of Leo Strauss [Albany: State University of New York 

Press, 1993], 123). This is no less true of philosophy and politics. 

10 

As Tepper, Progressive Minds, Conservative Politics, 29, indicates.


5 7 

sociology of philosophy, understanding the danger posed to philosophy by 

politics (21, 32). 

Once Strauss had established the gap that distinguishes “the small number 

of people who are able to understand by themselves” from “all men” or at 

any rate all Jews, to whom, for instance, the Mishneh Torah is addressed (94), 

he could not leave it at the statement that the Guide is a philosophic book, 

lest he remove Maimonides too far from the Jewish tradition, which depends 

so much on his teachings. 11 After all, Strauss remarks in a footnote about a 

chapter in the Guide that Shem Tob commented as follows on Maimonides’s 

teaching in that chapter, concerning the superiority of “speculation on the 

‘roots’” to the fiqh: “many Talmudic scholars have asserted that Maimonides 

had not written this chapter, and that, if he did write it, it ought to be suppressed, 

or rather, it would deserve to be burned” (93n164). That is the risk 

that Maimonides, who “doubtless subordinated his own views to those of 

the Jewish tradition,” faced, despite his infinitely careful writing, from “the 

general run of our scholars” (83–84) and that Strauss, too, would face, should 

he dare to emphasize in an irresponsible manner this aspect of the Maimonidean 

teaching. 12 

11 

Some who have followed Strauss have been similarly tactful in their treatments of both Strauss and 

Maimonides: compare the title and content of chapter 1 in Tepper, Progressive Minds, Conservative 

Politics; see also Kenneth Green, Leo Strauss and the Rediscovery of Maimonides (Chicago: University 

of Chicago Press, 2013), 27. 

Others have been forthright in casting doubt on the public or political character of their teachings. 

For instance, Steven B. Smith concludes that Strauss regarded “orthodoxy [as] a kind of Platonic noble 

lie that must be preserved in order to maintain standards of decency and public civility,” whereas 

only a kind of Spinozism or intellectualism has noetic merit: “In the final analysis Strauss’s difference 

with Spinoza is not with what he said, but with how he said it” (Smith, Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, 

Philosophy, Judaism [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006], 83). While Strauss had written that 

Jews ought to “relinquish” their claim on Spinoza (ibid., 65–66), some dissenting Jewish students of 

Strauss’s can respectfully bless Strauss’s name and praise him like a good wine—that much and more 

is at stake in the question of the literary character of one’s writings (David Novak, “Philosophy and 

the Possibility of Revelation: A Theological Response to the Challenge of Leo Strauss,” in Leo Strauss 

and Judaism, 172–92). Green walks a delicate line when he writes that Strauss “perceives that Maimonides 

is not aiming to ‘liberate’ even his best readers from the life of Torah and tradition, but he is 

helping such readers to reconcile themselves to them, and elevates them to a place that transcends the 

usual conflicts by its allowing room for freedom of thought while keeping in the bounds of the law.” 

Writing of the counsel “to be orthodox in morality and in public life, but to be as unorthodox, or even 

heterodox, as needed in the private realm of the mind and in the company of like-minded searchers, 

whose life is legitimated by the Torah itself,” Green keeps the question of the noetic status of the moral 

more uncertain than others do (Green, Leo Strauss on Maimonides, 51). 

12 

See Green’s discussion of Strauss’s famous letter to Glatzer and the latter’s response, where this very 

issue is raised (Leo Strauss on Maimonides, xx–xxi).


II 

“The Literary Character of the Guide for the Perplexed” begins with a quotation 

from Aristotle’s Metaphysics (38): “The later εὐπορία is a release from 

earlier aporias; but it is not possible for those who are unaware of the bond 

to release it.” 13 According to Lenzner, this is “the only complete sentence 

in Greek that appears in Strauss’s works.” Despite its importance, however, 

neither Lenzner nor others have paid much attention to it, except to note in 

passing, as Lenzner does, that it serves as evidence for “Strauss’s desire to 

induce the reader to experience [the] perplexity [of the subject matter of the 

Guide].” 14 In Aristotle’s text, “the later εὐπορία” refers to the εὐπορία that 

follows from having stated well the difficulties that thought must confront 

when faced with “a knot in the object” of its inquiry, including a statement 

of “both the other opinions that some have held on certain points, and any 

points besides these that happen to have been overlooked.” 15 The passage in 

question begins in the same way as the first section of Strauss’s essay begins: 

“We must, with a view to the science which we are seeking, first recount the 

subjects that should be discussed.” Consistent with this Aristotelian procedure, 

Strauss titles the first section of his essay “The Subject Matter” and 

begins it with the question: “To which science or sciences does the subject 

matter of [the Guide] belong?” (38). 

Why does Strauss use Aristotle’s Metaphysics to set the tone for his 

examination of the Guide? Is it only because of the clear procedure of the 

Metaphysics and Strauss’s acceptance of the need to proceed by examining 

common opinions and points that have been overlooked, which he does 

indeed do in his essay? 

In his introduction to the English translation of the Guide, Strauss draws 

the reader’s attention to the implicit significance of one of Maimonides’s 

references to the Torah by indicating the broader context of the quotation, 

which Maimonides omits. 16 In the essay on the literary character of the 

Guide, Strauss also refers to the hints that Maimonides is able to leave to his 

careful readers through the method of omitting something important from 

13 

Note that the epigraph also stands in stark contrast to the initial opposition Strauss sets up between 

Maimonides and Aristotle. 

14 

Lenzner, “A Literary Exercise,” 230. 

15 

Aristotle, Metaphysics 995a24–27, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, vol. 2 

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). 

16 

Leo Strauss, “How to Begin to Study The Guide of the Perplexed,” in The Guide of the Perplexed, by 

Moses Maimonides, trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), xxvi.


5 9 

the passages he quotes, as Strauss argues Maimonides does in the case of 

Aristotle’s teaching concerning the sense of touch (76). 

Let us apply the same principle to our reading of Strauss. Can it be that 

the interpreter of esoteric texts, whose own interpretation of Maimonides 

is, by his own light, at least partially esoteric, begins his essay with a Greek 

quotation that does no more than state the unobjectionable procedural 

requirement of taking stock of difficulties, common opinions, and overlooked 

points in order to get out of the bind of thought? Did Strauss merely intend 

to register his agreement with Aristotle that “it is not possible to untie a knot 

which one does not know”? 

It is hard not to recognize the similarity of the Aristotelian epigraph 

to Maimonides’s statement, which Strauss quotes, that the Guide is “a key 

permitting one to enter places the gates to which were locked.” 17 The quotation 

adds to the Maimonidean promise the qualification that only those who 

know that their thought is in a bind are able to enjoy release from aporia 

or perplexity. But who are those that know they are perplexed? Strauss tells 

us: only those who have studied philosophy can be in the state of perplexity 

that the Guide aims to help competent readers overcome. The content of the 

quotation thus indicates that Strauss himself is writing not merely for contemporary 

historians and the like, but also and essentially for a philosophical 

audience, for the philosophical few, for the few “who are able to understand 

by themselves” and who therefore recognize, living, as they do, under an 

enforced orthodoxy, that they are in an aporia or perplexity (94). 18 

In addition to the content of the quotation, its source, Aristotle’s Metaphysics, 

is a further indication of the philosophic subtext of Strauss’s essay. 

Seen in this light, Strauss’s essay treats much more than “the literary character” 

of Maimonides’s teaching; it discusses more than simply the methods 

required to “decipher” the Guide (60); it is more than merely a case study in 

the “sociology of philosophy”: it is itself an example of the kind of writing that 

the “sociology of philosophy” must take as its subject matter if it is to understand 

well the dangerous relationship between philosophy and politics (17–21). 

17 

Ibid., lvi. 

18 

This is another reason why it is not simply the case that in this essay Strauss aims to seduce readers 

into the Guide by making “the mysterious teaching more mysterious,” abstracting entirely from the 

issues of the Guide’s addressee, as Lenzner argues (“A Literary Exercise,” 227). We come to understand 

the importance of a specific addressee through insight into the problem in general of the classes to be 

addressed, which Strauss does treat in this essay, implicitly and explicitly. In this sense, the problem of 

the addressee is treated in abstraction, but is not omitted or overlooked, as Lenzner suggests.


But is not the sociology of philosophy concerned with the problem that lies 

at the intersection, as it were, of philosophy and politics, whereas metaphysics 

lies in the domain of pure, rather than political, philosophy? How are we to 

account for this discrepancy? How are we to make sense of the opening gesture 

toward pure philosophy (metaphysics) in a work on political philosophy? 19 

Strauss’s Aristotle quotation in fact puts this question to rest when looked 

at in context. If we follow Strauss’s own practice of reading, it is not enough 

to consider merely the quotation itself or the source from which it issues. 

It is necessary also to consider the context surrounding the quotation. The 

section of the Metaphysics immediately preceding the section from which 

Strauss quotes includes the following passage, which brings to the surface 

the element of habit, custom, and law evident in the discussion about Maimonides 

but hidden behind the epigraph in Strauss: 

The effect which lectures produce on a hearer depends on his habits; 

for we demand the language we are accustomed to, and that which is 

different from this seems not in keeping but somewhat unintelligible 

and foreign because it is not customary. For the customary is more 

intelligible. The force of custom is shown by the laws, in whose case, 

with regard to the legendary and childish elements in them, habit has 

more influence than our knowledge about them. 20 

III 

I have been arguing that Strauss’s essay teaches “between the lines” that the 

Guide is to be read principally as work of political philosophy. 21 Moreover, I 

have said that, for Strauss, this claim had to be concealed for the same reasons 

that Maimonides had to write esoterically: because of the fundamental 

tension between philosophy and politics and the need to protect generally 

accepted, customary opinions, while nevertheless reaching out to “the puppies” 

of the race of philosophers (36). 

Further evidence that Strauss teaches that Maimonides must be understood 

in this way if the aporias are to give way to εὐπορία comes from 

Strauss’s argument against a certain claim in favor of the superiority of 

19 

Fradkin discusses one familiar solution (“A Word Fitly Spoken,” 66–68). Here, I take a different 

approach. 

20 

Aristotle, Metaph. 994b32–995a6. As far as I know, no previous discussion of Strauss’s essay has noted 

this aspect of the epigraph, i.e., the reference to law, custom, and habit that precedes it in Aristotle. 

21 

See also comments that occur elsewhere in Persecution (177–82 especially).


6 1 

the Mishneh Torah to the Guide. According to that claim, the Guide is an 

ascent from “Image” (the chapter heading of chapter one) to “Wisdom” (the 

chapter heading of the final chapter). Inasmuch as the latter chapters of the 

Guide deal with actions, i.e., “the commands and prohibitions of the Torah,” 

actions are superior to opinions or to speculative study: wisdom consists in 

action (79–80). In response to that argument, Strauss notes that Maimonides 

teaches explicitly in the Mishneh Torah that “study of the Torah is superior in 

dignity to all other actions.” Moreover, Maimonides, Strauss avers, “asserts 

that most of the precepts of the law are merely a means for the acquisition of 

moral virtue, which, in turn, is merely a means subservient to the true end, 

namely, speculative virtue, or the true knowledge of things divine” (89). 

Not “Wisdom,” Strauss continues, but “The word wisdom” is the “chapter 

heading” of the final chapter. Consequently, the movement from the first to 

the last chapter is not strictly speaking an ascent: “‘The word wisdom’ is not 

necessarily superior to ‘Image,’ as is shown by the fact, constantly present in 

Maimonides’ mind, that many learned people living in a world of imaginary 

and imaginative ideas call their possession and use of these ideas ‘wisdom’ 

or ‘speculation.’” This renders the relationship of the first to the last chapter 

headings ambiguous. In order to grasp correctly the Guide’s principle of 

arrangement, Strauss says, it is necessary “for a little while to replace Torah 

by prophecy,” since the Torah was given to man through a prophet (89–90). 

A prophet is one who, in addition to his other excellences, “is able also to 

perform the highest political functions” (91). That is, he combines “theoretical 

and political excellence.” 22 This combination “is required for the understanding 

of the secret teaching of the prophets,” i.e., for the secret teaching of 

the Torah (57–58). “Since the Guide is devoted to the interpretation of that 

secret teaching,” Strauss remarks, “Maimonides will also have imitated, in 

some manner or other, the way of the prophets.” Even though the prophet 

relates his teaching to the people through the mediation of his imagination, 

whereas Maimonides relates his teaching through “conscious and intentional 

contradictions, hidden from the vulgar, between unparabolic and unenigmatic 

statements” (68–69), “the fundamental similarity between the prophet, 

the bringer of the secret teaching, and the interpreter of the secret teaching 

remains unaltered by that change in the method” (91). 

22 

For the argument that Strauss thinks Maimonides’s prophet impossible, see Patch, “Leo Strauss on 

Maimonides’ Prophetology.”


Strauss concludes this portion of his response to the argument for the 

superiority of actions with the assertion that “we are from the outset entitled 

to expect that the sequence of topics in the Guide would imitate the way of the 

prophets, which is ascent, followed by descent”; i.e., it would follow the way 

of the philosopher of Plato’s Republic, who returns to the cave of the city after 

having first left it, as Strauss indicates clearly by referring to the Republic in a 

footnote to Maimonides’s own views about “ascent to the highest knowledge” 

and “descent to the ‘people of the earth’” (90n155). 

Thus, although Strauss argues exoterically that the Guide is not a philosophic 

book, esoterically he implies that the Guide is a work, or rather a 

speech or “confidential communication” (82), of philosophy par excellence. 

Taken together, these two characterizations allow us to see the Guide as a 

work or perhaps the work of political philosophy, such that “Maimonides is 

not only the central figure in Jewish thought, but the central figure of all 

human thought,” inasmuch as the themes dealt with by political philosophy 

are the most exalted for the human mind. 23 Strauss’s esoteric thesis is 

addressed to the philosophical few, i.e., to those who are both dangerous for 

the law and in danger from the law; his exoteric thesis is designed to respond 

to the problem that “both the history of Judaism and the history of medieval 

philosophy remain deplorably incomplete, as long as the secret teaching of 

Maimonides has not been brought to light” (56). 

Ultimately, Strauss did not in fact bring that secret teaching to light, 

although he has been successful in redressing the deplorable states of affairs he 

lamented. And for the puppies of the race of the perfect, especially, although 

he does not illuminate, he does point out “well-hidden and spacious caves” 

(78), which shine with a light all their own. 

IV 

Earlier, it was noted that Strauss characterizes the Guide as “enlightened 

kalam,” which, to the extent that it defends a given law, is not the province 

of the philosopher as such. That the theme of enlightened kalam is of great 

importance for Strauss’s essay despite being mentioned explicitly only briefly 

can be seen by the fact that there are more references in the essay to Guide 

1.71—where Maimonides attacks the practitioners of vulgar kalam, states 

23 

Fradkin, “A Word Fitly Spoken,” 56.


6 3 

that he shares their intention, and promises his own type of kalam—than to 

any other chapter of the Guide, except for the introduction to book 1. 24 

We may well wonder what the relation is between enlightened kalam, on 

one hand, and the exoteric defense of the law by political philosophers more 

broadly, on the other. For Strauss, enlightened kalam, unlike the ordinary 

or vulgar kind, “insists on the necessity of starting from evident presuppositions, 

which are in accordance with the nature of things…[not] from arbitrary 

presuppositions, which are chosen not because they are true but because they 

make it easy to prove the beliefs taught by the law” (40). Strauss draws this 

characterization from Maimonides, who summarizes the difference between 

his kalam and vulgar kalam as follows: “[Practitioners of vulgar kalam] did 

not conform in their premises to the appearance of that which exists, but 

considered how being ought to be in order that it should furnish a proof for 

the correctness of a particular opinion, or at least should not refute it.” 25 By 

contrast, Maimonides asserts that “that which exists does not conform to 

the various opinions, but rather the correct opinions conform to that which 

exists.” He thus opposes the position that “no consideration is due to how that 

which exists is, for it is merely a custom…and from the point of view of the 

intellect…could well be different,” and that ultimately “nothing has a nature 

in any respect.” 26 

In the Enumeration of the Sciences, to which Strauss refers in this context 

as crucial for understanding the Guide (40n9), 27 Alfarabi defines kalam as 

“a disposition by which a human being is able to defend the specific opinions 

and actions that the founder of the religion declares and to refute by 

arguments whatever opposes it.” 28 He distinguishes five ways of doing so. The 

first involves “saying that the opinions of religions and all that is posited in 

them are not such as to be examined by opinions, deliberation, or human 

intellects.” According to this approach, “religions ought to provide what our 

intellects are not able to perceive…but also what our intellects object to.” This 

way rests on the premise that divine intellect and human intellect have no 

24 

The three most cited chapters are as follows: 43 references to the introduction to book 1, 21 references 

to 1.71, and 14 references to the introduction to book 3. 

25 

Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, 1:178. 

26 

Ibid., 179, 182. 

27 

In this same footnote, Strauss also refers to Plato’s Laws and to Guide 1.71. 

28 

Alfarabi, “The Enumeration of the Sciences,” trans. Charles E. Butterworth, in Medieval Political 

Philosophy: A Sourcebook, ed. Joshua Parens and Joseph C. Macfarland (Ithaca: Cornell University 

Press), 21.


likeness, even in “the human being who is perfect in humanity.” 29 It is neither 

Maimonides’s way nor Strauss’s. 

The second way “[sets] forth everything stated explicitly by the founder 

of the religion in the very utterances he expressed” and compares it to “the 

sense-perceptible, generally accepted, and intelligible things.” Then, “when 

[the practitioners of this approach] find one of these things or their consequences, 

however remote, testifying to what is in the religion, they defend [the 

religion] by means of that thing.” 30 If they find something that cannot be reconciled 

with the religion, “they are then of the opinion that the thing may be 

defended by it being said to be true because it was reported by one for whom 

it is impermissible to have ever lied or erred,” the founder of the religion. 31 

When faced with positions in the religion “imagined to be repulsive” 

from the perspective of sense perception, generally accepted opinions, or 

intelligible things, the third way “[pursues] the rest of the religions and [finds] 

what is repulsive in them,” confronting the followers of other religions with 

their own inconsistencies. Recognizing that no arguments to support the 

fundamental notions of a religion are “sufficient to validate them completely,” 

a fourth approach aims to “use things that would compel [an adversary] to 

refrain from encounter either from shame and being outmanoeuvred or from 

fear of something abhorrent befalling him.” Finally, a fifth way, which may 

involve “falsehood, deceit, slander, or disdain,” defends the religion by trying 

to “make it attractive, remove suspicion from it, and ward [away adversaries] 

by any chance thing.” 32 

Which, if any, of Farabi’s five ways of kalam most resembles enlightened 

kalam? Only the second approach starts from evident presuppositions: sense 

perception, generally accepted opinions, and intelligible things, although 

not all of them are “in accordance with the nature of things,” since generally 

accepted opinions may not be in accordance with the nature of things. Like 

Maimonides in the Guide, this approach interprets utterances in a religion 

so that they are consistent with what is evident in the highest sense of being 

intelligible. At another level it also makes concessions to what “has the most 

powerful testimony” behind it: generally accepted opinions not in accordance 

with the nature of things may be more “powerful” than intelligible things. 

29 

Ibid., 22. 

30 

Ibid. 

31 

Ibid., 23. 

32 

Ibid.


6 5 

I suggest that it is most plausible for the second way among the five to 

be enlightened kalam. At its best, it aims at a hermeneutic reconciliation 

between the claims of a religion and the claims of the intellect. Where no 

such reconciliation is available, it defends the religion, for legal or political 

reasons, as above reason. 33 

Having worked through the opposition in Strauss’s essay between the 

philosophic and the nonphilosophic to arrive at a more “synthetic” view, that 

of political philosophy—philosophy tailored for the polity or legal community, 

but not ultimately constrained by or reducible to that community—and having 

narrowed in on what Strauss meant by “enlightened kalam” through our 

discussion of Guide 1.71 and Alfarabi, we are now ready to look more closely 

at the similarity between “enlightened kalam” and “political philosophy.” 

Joshua Parens writes that “the affinities between [the] true science of 

the law and kalam, as well as between the former and political philosophy, 

make the Guide one of the most difficult of all medieval texts to interpret.” 34 

He is right to speak of affinities. But we need to distinguish the terms more 

clearly. We must modify the set: “true science of the law, kalam, and political 

philosophy” to read: “true science of the law, vulgar kalam, enlightened 

kalam, political philosophy.” Now, when Parens asks: “If the relation between 

kalam and philosophy is one of hostility, then how could Maimonides write 

a book containing elements of both?” we can say that the answer rests on 

the distinction between vulgar and enlightened kalam. The latter, as we have 

seen, is open to reconciling the fundamental opinions of the religion with the 

intelligible things, the subject matter of philosophy. Hostility only obtains 

where divergence reigns with no hope of hermeneutic reconciliation. 35 Vulgar 

kalam drops out of the set, and we are left with the true science of the law, 

enlightened kalam, and political philosophy. 36 

33 

Ibid. This way is also closest to the approach intimated in Plato’s Laws (887b, 890d), which Strauss 

cites in the same footnote in which he refers to Alfarabi (40n9). 

34 

Joshua Parens, introduction to Medieval Political Philosophy: A Sourcebook, 150. 

35 

As Strauss writes, describing Maimonides’s position, there is an “accordance [that] exists between 

the philosophers and the adherents of the law in every respect except as regards the question (which, 

however, is the decisive question) of the creation of the world” (“Literary Character,” 43). 

36 

See “Literary Character,” 93, where Strauss draws the conclusion that “the true science of the law, 

mentioned at the beginning as the subject of the work, is identical with wisdom.” This identity only 

comes to light as the initial distinction between “the true science of the law and the fiqh,” Talmud, or 

“legalistic study of the law” (39), is replaced, or deepened, by the addition of the category “wisdom.” 

The remaining step is to grasp that the wisdom or philosophy equivalent to the true science of the law 

and not to true science simply is not philosophy simply but political philosophy.


Furthermore, the true science of the law just is enlightened kalam. As 

Strauss writes, “Since the students of the roots [of religion, i.e., the students of 

the true science of the law] are identified by Maimonides with…the students 

of kalam, we shall say that the true science of the law is the kalam,” with the 

qualification, as we have seen, that it is not vulgar, but enlightened kalam. 

What, then, is the relation of these two terms to political philosophy? 

In response to Parens’s observation that “Maimonides’ Guide is first and 

foremost a work of kalam [and] only in some far more complicated sense a 

work of political philosophy,” 37 we can say that the gap between kalam and 

political philosophy closes significantly or entirely, when we begin to talk 

specifically of enlightened kalam, for this latter strikes us as equivalent to 

political philosophy. 

As Jeffrey Bernstein writes, Maimonides’s “‘enlightened Kalam,’ while 

different in kind from philosophy, is not pure dissimulation…[for the] view 

that the city needs both laws and legitimating authority…is, after all, a philosophic 

view.” 38 Similarly, Strauss’s political philosophy or enlightened kalam, 

while “different in kind from philosophy,” is also not “pure dissimulation,” 

since the need for law and hence the defense of law is for Strauss to be comprehended 

as part of philosophy. 39 

Kalam works in the service of a divine law and is thus bound up with 

theology. Is it still kalam in the absence of theology? Is not this issue sufficient 

to distinguish kalam from political philosophy? Perhaps. But because Strauss 

included “The Literary Character” in a work devoted to the principal theme 

of the sociology of philosophy, as discussed above, and on the strength of the 

connections discussed so far, I believe that, in this work at least, he indicates 

their fundamental identity. 40 

37 

Parens, introduction to Medieval Political Philosophy, 150. 

38 

Jeffrey Bernstein, Leo Strauss on the Borders of Judaism, Philosophy, and History (Albany: State 

University of New York Press, 2015), 59–60. 

39 

I admit that there is a tension between the view that political philosophy is a part or branch of philosophy 

and the view that it is more than that in what Strauss says and what I have said. In response, I 

am most satisfied by Meier’s elegant formulation that “political philosophy is the part of philosophy in 

which the whole of philosophy is in question” (Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, 103, 

italics in original). 

40 

All the more so in his reference to Plato’s Laws in the key passages on kalam. See “Literary Character,” 

40n9.


6 7 

When Strauss writes in another context that after Heidegger we have to 

work particularly assiduously to find a rational basis for liberalism, 41 he is 

proposing a project of enlightened kalam. That is, he calls for a defense of 

the law or prevailing orthodoxy (liberalism), through the procurement of a 

rational basis for the law, that nevertheless tacitly transcends the law, and 

that proceeds on the basis of “evident presuppositions…in accordance with 

the nature of things.” Indeed, Strauss’s return to classical natural right as a 

basis for the public defense and corrective critique of the liberal regime is, I 

suggest, usefully regarded as just such a project. 

For Strauss, “the intention of the science of kalam is to defend the law, 

especially against the opinions of philosophers.” That is also what Strauss 

does with liberalism vis-à-vis Heidegger (and others). 42 Strauss’s kalam is 

enlightened because, like Maimonides, he aims to have correct opinions conform 

to what is, rather than postulating what is on the basis of the prevailing 

opinion. 43 The law needs to be defended, since philosophers have dealt a decisive 

blow to its roots. In this regard, Strauss wrote about himself that “I… 

cannot bring myself to clinging to philosophic positions [i.e., ‘all rational liberal 

philosophic positions’] which have been shown to be inadequate.” 44 Yet 

the inadequacy of rational liberal philosophic positions does not imply the 

political rejection of liberalism; it necessitates the task of finding a rational 

basis for political liberalism. In short: the philosophical liberal is perplexed. 

Strauss is his or her guide. Enlightened kalam is the way. Preservation of 

fidelity to both law and reason is the end. Reason alone is the coping stone. 

41 

Leo Strauss, “Existentialism,” Interpretation 22, no. 3 (1995): 305. 

42 

Having spoken of Heidegger, it is worth noting that he holds an important place in Lenzner’s article 

on Strauss’s essay. Encouraged by the similarity of Strauss’s epigraph to that of Heidegger’s Being and 

Time, Lenzner surprisingly asserts that “the six sections of ‘Literary Character’ correspond literarily 

to the six sections of part 1 of Being and Time” (“A Literary Exercise,” 233nn24, 46). I cannot expand 

on the theme here, but I believe that Lenzner’s gesture toward Heidegger when writing of Strauss’s 

essay is entirely appropriate. 

43 

As is clear in the case of both Maimonides and Strauss, however, the option will always be open to 

interpreters to emphasize either the kalam or the enlightened aspects of enlightened kalam, i.e., the 

“philosophical” or the “political” in “political philosophy.” 

44 

Quoted in Richard Velkley, Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy: On Original Forgetting 

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 112.

6 8 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 42 / Issue 1


6 9 

The Spirit of the Age: 

J. S. Mill’s Radical Manifesto 

Q u e n t i n Tay l or 

Rogers State University 

QTaylor@rsu.edu 

Abstract: The Spirit of the Age, an early work by J. S. Mill, has long figured as the Ur-text in 

revisionist accounts on the English philosopher’s reputation as a classical liberal and proponent 

of the “open society.” It has not, however, received the type of sustained analysis one 

might expect in light of its alleged importance. This article—the first of its kind—provides 

a close reading of The Spirit of the Age in the context of Mill’s lifelong aspirations for radical 

reform under the guidance of a moral and intellectual elite. While most scholars view the 

work as an anomaly (or ignore it altogether), a survey of Mill’s later writings and correspondence 

has led others to detect a broader continuity between the “authoritarian” teaching of 

The Spirit of the Age and the “libertarian” gospel of On Liberty. The interpretation presented 

here supports the revisionist view of a Mill who was deeply committed to liberty and control 

throughout his long career, and who never abandoned his utopian vision of an elite-led 

“reform of humanity.” 

John Stuart Mill’s reputation as the paradigmatic nineteenth-century liberal 

has been under assault for half a century now. The attack began in earnest 

with the appearance of Maurice Cowling’s Mill and Liberalism (1963), a 

polemical work that underscored the “authoritarian” and “utopian” streak 

beneath Mill’s putative liberalism. 1 Mill scholars, shocked and indignant at 

Cowling’s “daring assault on Mill’s standing as the apostle of liberty,” 2 barely 

had time to recover before Shirley Letwin (1965), in more scholarly fashion, 

1 

Maurice Cowling, Mill and Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963). 

2 

John C. Rees, “The Reaction to Cowling on Mill,” Mill Newsletter 1, no. 2 (1966): 9. 



reiterated many of the charges leveled by Cowling. 3 A decade later Gertrude 

Himmelfarb (1974) developed her earlier thesis of the “two Mills”—the celebrated 

“libertarian” Mill of On Liberty (1859) and “illiberal” Mill of The 

Spirit of the Age (1831). 4 In conjunction, these charges of inconsistency, incoherence, 

and illiberalism presented a serious challenge to Mill’s status as a 

liberal icon and proponent of the “open society.” The charges were, however, 

largely ignored or dismissed by the Mill establishment, which preferred to 

debate such issues as the consistency between Mill’s commitment to liberty 

and his arch-value of utility. 

A quarter century would pass before another major revisionist challenge— 

this time by a leading Mill scholar, who could not be so easily dismissed. In 

John Stuart Mill on Liberty and Control (1999), Joseph Hamburger crowned a 

distinguished career with a tightly reasoned, fully documented tour de force 

that owed little to either Cowley’s polemics or Himmelfarb’s “two Mills.” 

Through a close reading of his writings and correspondence, Hamburger 

concluded that Mill was deeply committed to liberty and control, not merely 

in his early years, but throughout his entire life. The “authoritarian” and “utopian” 

elements so visible in works like The Spirit of The Age (1831) were not 

quietly jettisoned during Mill’s mature period, but refined, reformulated, and 

even repressed. Far from domesticating his radical and visionary ideas—the 

standard interpretation—Mill concealed them in his private correspondence, 

and cryptically betrayed them in his public writings, including On Liberty, 

that “bible of liberal individualism.” 

For Hamburger, Mill remained an elitist utopian reformer to the end, 

albeit a cryptic and cautious one, viewing liberty less as an end in itself than 

as a means to social transformation. More specifically, Mill valued unfettered 

free expression as a means to facilitate the transition from a society marked 

by moral and intellectual “anarchy” to one based on moral consensus and 

enlightened rule under the benign auspices of a religion of humanity. That even 

Mill’s classic On Liberty was part of a recondite utopian scheme was Hamburger’s 

most original (and provocative) finding in a work full of surprises. 5 

3 

Shirley Letwin, The Pursuit of Certainty: David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Beatrice 

Webb (1965) (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1998). 

4 

Gertrude Himmelfarb, On Liberty and Liberalism: The Case of John Stuart Mill (San Francisco: ICI 

Press, 1974). 

5 

In fairness, Hamburger was anticipated, if not directly influenced, by F. L. van Holthoon’s The 

Road to Utopia: A Study of John Stuart Mill’s Social Thought (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1971), an unjustly 

ignored book wholly absent from the debate over Mill and liberalism. Like Hamburger, Van Holthoon 

drew heavily from Mill’s public and private papers and reached many of the same conclusions. Mill 

not only remained a radical and utopian reformer “up to his very last days,” he retained his faith in the


7 1 

John Stuart Mill on Liberty and Control was widely—and for the most 

part—favorably reviewed. Hamburger, who sadly died before the book was 

published, would have been gratified by the immediate response and heartened 

at having made an important contribution to rethinking Mill and the 

liberal tradition. He may have been disappointed, however, in what followed. 

His portrait of a Mill passionately committed to liberty and control has failed 

to displace the solid, if somewhat eccentric, Victorian liberal. Recent studies 

either ignore Hamburger (and the “early” Mill) altogether or reject his 

revisionist reading outright. 6 Among authors of full-length works on Mill 

only Linda Raeder acknowledges her debt to Hamburger. 7 Not surprisingly 

the conventional scholarly image of Mill continues to inform more popular 

views of the philosopher. In his review of Richard Reeves’s Victorian Firebrand 

(2007), a writer for The New Yorker blithely observed that “certainly 

no one has been so right about so many things so much of the time as John 

Stuart Mill.” 8 The reviewer shows no awareness of Mill’s complex and contested 

legacy. 9 

authority of a moral-intellectual elite (127). In this enduring vision, Van Holthoon locates the “link 

between Mill’s ideas of the Spiritual Power as expressed in ‘The Spirit of the Age’ and Mill’s defense of 

freedom of inquiry in On Liberty” (128). The stark contrast between the two works—an obvious fact 

to most—is actually more apparent than real—in fact “superficial.” “There is no evidence…that Mill 

lost his faith in an ultimate consensus in the meantime” (115). On the contrary, there was “no fundamental 

change between 1831 and 1859 in Mill’s conception of the elite as a Spiritual Power” (117). 

What did change was “the presentation of his arguments for a Spiritual Power,” a shift in strategy due 

to changed circumstances and the readjustment of Mill’s social barometer. By 1859 the hoped-for 

cognoscenti was nowhere in sight, and with the rise of democracy Mill “began to put more stress on 

the critical [as opposed to the authoritative] function of the elite.” Accordingly, the much-vaunted 

“insistence of On Liberty on independent thinking and the need for questioning all opinions” was 

not a celebration of critical thinking per se, but signaled a retreat—“a measure of Mill’s disillusionment”—albeit 

a strategic one, for “Mill expected that discussion would lead to the accumulation of 

truth” and the emergence of a future consensus (122). This anticipates Hamburger to a remarkable 

degree, whose esoteric reading of On Liberty echoes through the path cut by the forgotten author of 

The Road to Utopia. 

6 

David O. Brink, Mill’s Progressive Principles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) and Bruce L. 

Kinzer, J. S. Mill Revisited (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) make no mention of Hamburger or 

The Spirit of the Age, while Frederick Rosen curtly “reject[s] Hamburger’s belief…that Mill’s method 

[in On Liberty]…was meant to disguise, conceal, equivocate, and mislead” (Rosen, Mill [Oxford: 

Oxford University Press, 2013], 22). Dale Miller, who glosses over The Spirit of the Age, declares Hamburger’s 

attempt “to reveal Mill as an anti-liberal” a failed cause. “This is not the first time that such 

an unmasking had been attempted, but the project is hopeless” (Miller, J. S. Mill: Moral, Social and 

Political Thought [Malden, MA: Polity, 2010], 180). As illustrated below, this dismissive attitude is not 

without its ironies. 

7 

Linda Raeder, John Stuart Mill and the Religion of Humanity (Columbia: University of Missouri 

Press, 2002). 

8 

Adam Gopnik, “Right Again: The Passions of John Stuart Mill,” The New Yorker, Oct. 6, 2008. 

9 

This persistence of the popular image of Mill as a secular saint and champion of liberal democracy 

is not restricted to journalists. Philosopher Richard Rorty, who was certainly aware of Mill’s contested


While Hamburger’s revisionist account represents something of a 

“paradigm shift,” it is likely to remain a minority report for the foreseeable 

future. 10 Nonetheless, the portrait of a Mill who strategically muted his message, 

deliberately shaded his meaning, and cleverly concealed his higher aims 

presents a compelling invitation to re-examine England’s foremost “apostle 

of liberty.” Here I wish to explore a pivotal work in Mill’s oeuvre central to 

“revisionist” accounts of his social thought, but never subject to sustained 

analysis—The Spirit of the Age. 

Students of Mill (1806–1873) have typically framed his life and work on 

the basis of his famed Autobiography. From 1822 to 1830 young Mill was 

absorbed in reformist political activity—debating, discussing, and writing for 

the popular press. Upon his return from France, where he had documented 

for English readers political developments in the wake of the “Bourgeois 

Revolution,” Mill began to write his first essays on more general social and 

political themes. This shift was largely a result of his encounter with the writings 

of the Saint-Simonians, a small but influential sect of French reformers 

who embraced a sweeping, evolutionary vision of the future society. Mill 

had always been an “advanced” radical, but as a direct disciple of Bentham 

he grounded his reformist agenda in a theory of human nature as opposed 

to a pattern of historical development. This would all change through his 

immersion in the world of the Saint-Simonians, who elaborated a historicist, 

progressive, and perfectionist view of social arrangements. 

Mill was particularly struck by the sect’s division of history into “organic” 

and “critical” periods, the former marked by a general consensus of values 

among elites, the latter by a conflict of ideas in regard to “the needs of 

humanity.” 11 Mill singled out the Système de politique positive, an early work 

by Auguste Comte (then a disciple of Saint-Simon), who viewed human evolegacy, 

nonetheless identified his “most sacred texts” (On Liberty and Utilitarianism) as the epitome 

of contemporary humanist and democratic aspirations. Quoted in Ronald Beiner, “John Stuart Mill’s 

Project to Turn Atheism into a Religion,” in Civil Religion: A Dialogue in the History of Political Philosophy 

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 259, 265n. 

10 

Hamburger’s John Stuart Mill on Liberty and Control bears comparison with Leonard W. Levy’s 

Jefferson and Civil Liberties: The Darker Side (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963). 

Both works challenged a liberal icon, and both have shared a similar fate. The revisionist focus on 

the “darker side” of Mill has been placed in the larger context of the “darker side” of liberalism, viz., 

its scientism, elitism, and preoccupation with control. As the prototypical “liberal intellectual,” 

Mill—who valued liberty and equality, but also insisted on moral and intellectual authority—uniquely 

embodies “the main dilemma of liberalism, in all its modern varieties” (Robert Hollinger, The Dark 

Side of Liberalism: Elitism vs. Democracy [Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996], 3). 

11 

J. S. Mill, Autobiography, in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (hereafter CW), vol. 1, ed. John M. 

Robson and Jack Stillinger (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 171.


7 3 

lution in terms of theological, metaphysical, and positive (or scientific) stages 

of development. If the theory of “organic” and “critical” ages reinforced Mill’s 

radicalism, Comte’s theory of progressive historical stages re-edified his faith 

in the future, and endowed his sentiments with “a scientific shape.” 12 

While Mill’s encounter with contemporary French social thought largely 

accounts for his shift from practical politics to social theory, this move was 

reinforced by his disenchantment with Benthamism, disappointment with 

the French Revolution, and frustration with the pace of reform in Britain. 

Whatever the ultimate causes, Mill embarked on a series of articles for the 

Examiner in January 1831, a radical weekly for which he had previously written. 

Looking back a quarter century after its appearance, Mill expressed a 

low opinion of The Spirit of the Age, which he characterized as “lumbering in 

style” and “ill timed.” 13 It is notable, however, that he does not fault the work 

for its analysis or findings, a point I will return to below. 

Mill’s decision not to reissue The Spirit of the Age (as he did a number of 

other works) has been widely viewed as a rejection of its teaching. His first 

biographer, friend and protégé Alexander Bain, merely listed it among those 

works produced by Mill between 1830 and 1840. In a footnote, Bain observes 

that the essays “all point in the direction of his Representative Government, in 

so far as they contain anything constructive.” 14 On its face this would appear 

an odd remark given the striking differences between the two works and 

the three decades that separated them. Representative Government (1861), 

a lengthy treatise belonging to Mill’s “mature” period, contains a detailed 

account of “real” and “ideal” forms of government, while the brief Spirit of 

the Age says almost nothing about political institutions or governmental 

reform. Yet Bain appears to detect the essence of each work in a common 

thread: the authority of the expert. 

Sixty years later F. A. Hayek recovered the forgotten essays and published 

them in a single volume for the first time. His introduction provides the biographical 

and intellectual context of The Spirit of the Age but little else. For 

Hayek the work’s value is essentially derivative—the “light it throws on one 

of the most interesting phases in the development of a great figure of the past 

12 

Ibid., 173. 

13 

Ibid., 181. 

14 

Alexander Bain, John Stuart Mill: A Criticism with Personal Reflections (1882) (New York: Augustus 

M. Kelley, 1969), 40.


century.” 15 Had he bothered to follow this light he may have discovered an early 

traveler on “the road to serfdom,” whose “fatal conceit” and “abuse of reason” 

prefigured the experiments in social engineering of the twentieth century. It 

would be left to Mill’s first modern biographer, Michael Packe, to make the 

chilling discovery. In The Life of John Stuart Mill, Packe identified the author 

of The Spirit of the Age as a zealous convert to Saint-Simonism, who foresaw 

in England “an enlightened despotism by a scientific corps d’elite who…would 

inaugurate plenty, peace, and the religion of humanity.” 16 In Mill’s intellectual 

elitism, Packe found a betrayal of Liberalism—the young reformer “became a 

revolutionary.” “There will be,” Mill prophesied, “a moral and social revolution, 

which shall, indeed, take away no men’s lives and property, but which shall 

leave no man a fraction of unearned distinction or unearned importance.” 17 

The question of how “a moral and social revolution” in aristocratic 

England would leave “men’s lives and property” untouched, or what form 

of rule could “leave no man a fraction of unearned distinction or unearned 

importance,” must be deferred for the moment. The present concern is to 

consider the radical, revolutionary, and illiberal nature of Mill’s remarks. An 

embarrassed Packe called the entire effort “laborious nonsense, of which Mill 

was later much ashamed.” 18 Biographer John Ellery was equally astonished by 

such passages in The Spirit of the Age and no less damning than Packe: “Mill’s 

plea for social revolution as the ultimate solution to class struggle has the 

appearance of Communist doctrine and was essentially Utopian nonsense.” 19 

Ellery repeats Packe’s charge that “Mill was later to feel very much ashamed 

of it,” yet the assertion is unsubstantiated: there is no direct evidence that 

Mill ever retracted a word of it. 

Today’s reader is tempted to attribute the harsh judgments of Packe and 

Ellery to the overheated rhetoric of Cold War–era scholarship. John Robson, 

erstwhile dean of Mill studies and general editor of the Collected Works, 

assigned Mill’s emphasis on intellectual leadership to youthful exuberance 

(Mill was but twenty-five and a rebel to Benthamism) and to the heated 

political environment between the French Revolution (1830) and the English 

Reform Bill (1832). He also places Mill’s remarks in the context of the 

15 

F. A. Hayek, introduction to The Spirit of the Age, by J. S. Mill (Chicago: University of Chicago 

Press, 1942), xxxiii. 

16 

Michael St. John Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill (New York: Macmillan, 1954), 98. 

17 

J. S. Mill, The Spirit of the Age, in CW, vol. 22, ed. Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson (Toronto: 

University of Toronto Press, 1986), 245. Hereafter citations (essay number followed by page number) 

appear in the main text. 

18 

Packe, John Stuart Mill, 98. 

19 

John B. Ellery, John Stuart Mill (New York: Twayne, 1964), 38.


7 5 

“critical” (or “transitional”) state of society Mill hoped to overcome through 

the leadership of a radical intellectual elite. Robson claims Mill retained an 

emphasis on expert judgment in his later thought but discarded its more illiberal 

aspects. Moreover, he suggests that authors such as Packe and Ellery had 

taken passages from The Spirit of the Age “out of context” and “used [them] 

to prove much more than they can.” 20 Just what they had tried “to prove” 

Robson does not say. 

In spite of such objections, the notion of “two Mills” had by the early 1970s 

secured a hearing in the academy. Allan Megill observed that Mill’s status as 

a “paradigmatic liberal” had been successfully challenged (at least as far as his 

early thought was concerned) and identified The Spirit of the Age as “the clearest 

expression of [Mill’s ‘authoritarian’] doctrine.” 21 Gertrude Himmelfarb, 

who had reprinted The Spirit of the Age in 1963, would juxtapose it with On 

Liberty in her subsequent full-length study. For Himmelfarb, Mill’s decision 

not to reissue the earlier work was predictable, for it could never be “brought… 

into conformity with the central thesis” of the latter. 22 Starting from the same 

premise—“a democratic society, if not a democratic government”—both essays 

identified the “overweening influence of public opinion” as “the gravest evil” of 

contemporary society. In essence, the two works are logically inverted: “starting 

from the same point, [they] arrived at quite different conclusions.” 23 Even 

C. L. Ten, a noted defender of the liberal Mill, acknowledged that The Spirit of 

the Age, while an anomaly among his works, could be read as an illberal tract. 24 

Similarly, Iain Hampsher-Monk has called it “the classic expression of Mill’s 

brief apostasy from defending freedom of expression.” 25 

Whereas most observers view the relationship between The Spirit of 

the Age and On Liberty in terms of “antagonism” others have stressed their 

broader continuity. Alan Ryan, a leading Mill scholar, acknowledges some 

surface “tension” between the two works, but finds little “difference of 

20 

John M. Robson, The Improvement of Mankind: The Social and Political Thought of John Stuart Mill 

(Toronto: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), 100, 77. 

21 

Allan D. Megill, “J. S. Mill’s Religion of Humanity and the Second Justification for the Writing of 

On Liberty,” Journal of Politics 34, no. 2 (1972): 612. 

22 

Himmelfarb, Liberty and Liberalism, 36. 

23 

Ibid., 36–37. 

24 

This admission aside, “the Mill of this period differed radically from the Mill of On Liberty” (C. L. 

Ten, Mill on Liberty [Oxford: Clarendon, 1980], 170). 

25 

Ian Hampsher-Monk, A History of Modern Political Thought: Major Political Thinkers from Hobbes 

to Marx (London: Blackwell, 1992), 347n.


substance.” 26 Admittedly, the earlier work has a Janus-faced quality, at once 

“conservative” and “radical” in its teaching: “The essay is conservative to the 

degree that it laments the absence of authority—intellectual, religious, political—but 

radical to the extent it uses the exemplars of true authority beloved of 

conservatives to mock the claims of contemporary intellectuals, aristocracy, 

and clergy to such authority.” Elsewhere Ryan suggests that Mill retained his 

belief in intellectual authority and a future consensus, but extended his timetable 

to a remote futurity in the face of certain stubborn facts. As an inspired, 

intoxicated youth, Mill “thought it more urgent to reach that terminus [in the 

not too distant future], whereas later he thought it less urgent to reach it and 

that it was very far distant indeed.” 27 

The notion that Mill’s methods shifted while his goals remained constant 

was fully developed by Joseph Hamburger in Liberty and Control. Hamburger 

identified The Spirit of the Age as a work in which Mill tipped his hand 

to reveal “something like a utopian desire.” 28 Under the influence of Comtean 

historicism, Mill drew a parallel between the revolutionary conditions 

of France in 1789 and those of England in 1831. More specifically, “England 

lagged behind a generation, and he and other radicals—bold freethinking 

opponents of church, crown, and aristocracy—were…playing the role of philosophes, 

not eager for violence but dreaming of transformation.” 29 Like his 

mentors James Mill and Jeremy Bentham, John Mill was a soi-disant radical 

who deplored violence but wanted to transform society and thereby “reform 

the world.” His disappointment with the results of the Reform Act and his 

impatience with a doubting humanity led him to abandon the florid rhetoric 

in The Spirit of the Age but not the ultimate goal—the “moral regeneration of 

mankind.” Moreover, Mill “continued to regard his own time as having features 

of what in 1831 he began calling a transitional age, and he continued to 

visualize ways in which a natural or organic state of society could supersede 

the transitional state.” 30 

26 

Alan Ryan, introduction to Mill: The Spirit of the Age, On Liberty, The Subjection of Women (New 

York: W. W. Norton, 1997), xxv. Ryan’s pairing of the early, “authoritarian” Mill with the mature, 

“libertarian” and “feminist” Mill is suggestive. 

27 

Alan Ryan, “Bureaucracy, Democracy, and Liberty: Some Unanswered Questions in Mill’s Politics,” 

in J. S. Mill’s Political Thought: A Bicentennial Reassessment, ed. Nadia Urbinati and Alex Zakaras 

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 159. 

28 

Joseph Hamburger, John Stuart Mill on Liberty and Control (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 

1999), 109. 

29 

Ibid., 111. 

30 

Ibid., 193–94.


7 7 

The “natural” or “organic” state that Mill dreamed of would be marked 

by a broad consensus on matters of morals, politics, and the socially desirable—an 

age in which theological and metaphysical modes of thought would 

give way to “positivist” or scientific ones. Conversely, theistic religion would 

in time be eclipsed by “the religion of humanity” as the unifying ideology 

of a new secular order. Mill’s hostility to religion in general, and Christianity 

in particular, is almost entirely confined to his private papers, as are 

his references to “the religion of humanity.” According to Hamburger, Mill 

understood that it was necessary to conceal both this hostility and his hopes 

for the future if he was to command an audience in a “transitional” (and 

Victorian) age. Since his “long-range goals and expectations could have been 

inferred from [his criticism of religion], and…[he] thought revealing such 

things was rhetorically foolish,” Mill excluded The Spirit of the Age from his 

first volume of collected essays, Dissertations and Discussions (1859). 31 Had he 

included it, the jarring contrast with On Liberty (also published in 1859) may 

have exposed the deeper purpose concealed beneath Mill’s bold libertarianism. 

Despite appearances, it was not liberty for its own sake or mere pluralism 

that Mill ultimately championed in On Liberty, but liberty as a means of 

hastening the demise of the erroneous opinions, baneful institutions, and 

retrograde practices of a “transitional” age. On the other hand, the “natural” 

or “organic” society idealized in The Spirit of the Age—a society marked 

by a widespread consensus articulated by an intellectual elite—appears far 

removed from the cultural pluralism (putatively) championed in On Liberty. 

As Hamburger observes, the perceived contrast between the two positions 

“would [also] have raised questions about how liberty would survive in a 

natural, organic state of society, which of course has close affinities with the 

religion of humanity.” 32 

As noted above, Hamburger’s ground-breaking study was widely reviewed, 

but his provocative thesis has not had the impact one might expect from a work 

by a veteran Mill scholar. In his intellectual biography of Mill, Capaldi ignores 

Hamburger and downplays the significance of The Spirit of the Age, where Mill 

merely “questioned whether the lack of an authoritative center in liberal culture 

was a good thing.” 33 As we shall see, Mill considered just such an “authoritative 

center” the sine qua non of a post-transitional society. Similarly, Capaldi 

31 

Ibid., 211. 

32 

Ibid., 212. 

33 

Nicholas Capaldi, John Stuart Mill: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 

99.


concedes that “Mill advocated the need for cultural elitism,” 34 yet Mill’s elitism 

was hardly confined to “cultural” matters. More importantly, there is little effort 

to address the broader issues raised by Hamburger or reassess Mill’s liberal 

credentials. 35 The same may be said of a collection of essays on Mill’s political 

thought published to commemorate the bicentennial of his birth. Among 

the fourteen contributors only Alan Ryan mentions The Spirit of the Age, and 

Hamburger is ignored by all, the victim of an apparent conspiracy of silence. 36 

The intention here is to challenge this silence by taking seriously the 

claim that Mill never abandoned the radicalism and elitism found in The 

Spirit of the Age—that the essay is neither a youthful aberration nor an intellectual 

anomaly. The first step is a close reading of The Spirit of the Age, which 

has been alternatively ignored, dismissed, and enlisted by scholars, but never 

subjected to sustained analysis. Since so much of the debate over Mill’s reputation 

as a liberal thinker turns on whether he abandoned or retained the 

doctrines in The Spirit of the Age, a clear statement of its teaching will serve as 

a touchstone for addressing the broader question. It will also reveal a thinker 

at stark variance with the popular image of a faithful defender of “cultural 

pluralism” and the “open society.” 37 

The essay itself appeared seriatim in seven installments (essays four and 

five were in two parts) between January 9 and May 29 of 1831 in the Londonbased 

Examiner and occupies forty-four pages in the Collected Works. In the 

34 

Ibid., 104. 

35 

For the little distrust he does show towards “rule by experts,” Capaldi is chided by Rosen, who 

“find[s] no echo” of an authoritarian scientific elite in Mill and blithely assigns such forebodings to a 

“fail[ure] to capture Mill’s aspirations for ethology” (Mill, 86). In fact, there is far more than an “echo” 

of elite rule and social engineering in Mill’s ethology, which is arguably the most dubious feature of 

his social theory. Similarly, Miller chides Hamburger for his “somewhat fantastic worries about the 

elite’s exercising control over the rest of society through shame.” Yet it is just such informal controls 

working in tandem with his more formal ethological aspirations (not Mill’s alleged political elitism, 

which for Miller “is a far more plausible concern”) that complicates (and compromises) Mill’s liberalism 

for Hamburger (Miller, J. S. Mill, 187). 

36 

See Urbinati and Zakaras, eds., J. S. Mill’s Political Thought. This neglect is not entirely surprising, 

for as John Gibbons observes, “the unresolved tensions, incoherencies, inconsistencies, and even contradictions 

within Mill’s corpus” have resisted repeated attempts to resolve them (Gibbons, “J. S. Mill, 

Liberalism, and Progress,” in Victorian Liberalism: Nineteenth-Century Political Thought and Practice, 

ed. Richard Bellamy [London: Routledge, 1987], 91). 

37 

Mill’s close association with “pluralism” and the “open society” is largely owing to influential 

works by Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper. Yet as Richard Vernon points out (and The Spirit of the Age 

confirms), “Mill did not believe that the case for liberty rested on Berlinian pluralism any more than 

it rested on Popperian fallibilism” (Vernon, “J. S. Mill and the Religion of Humanity,” in Religion, 

Secularization and Political Thought: Thomas Hobbes to J. S. Mill. ed. James E. Crimmins [London: 

Routledge, 1989], 176). Popper was critical of Mill in his Comtean (historicist) phase, but read On 

Liberty as an endorsement of the “open society.”


7 9 

Autobiography, Mill appears to dismiss The Spirit of the Age, and yet—significantly—does 

not attribute the essay’s “failure” to any inherent defect in its 

argument. Rather, he faults the style as ill calculated to stir the imagination 

of mere “newspaper readers.” 38 Style aside, the great public agitation preceding 

the passage of the Reform Bill insured that his revelations would fall on 

deaf ears. Why then did Mill call attention to this allegedly “embarrassing” 

work a quarter century later in the Autobiography? Perhaps he recognized 

it as marking a sea-change in his intellectual development, one that would 

run like a concurrent stream through the sluice of his inherited Utilitarianism. 

39 (Much of Mill’s alleged incoherence and inconsistency can be traced to 

such intellectual “eclecticism.”) His early romance with Comte would blossom 

into a systematic study of the Frenchman’s magnum opus and spark a 

lengthy correspondence with the prophet himself. 40 Comte’s excentricités of 

thought and conduct would prove too much even for Mill, but the break in 

correspondence did not mark a rejection of Comtean ideas: radical reform, 

social transformation, elite leadership, applied social science, and the culte de 

humanité remained leading articles of Mill’s visionary creed. 

In The Spirit of the Age, Mill deployed these “new ideas” to “point out in the 

character of the present age, the anomalies and evils characteristic of the transition 

from a system of opinions which had worn out, to another only in the 

process of being formed.” The “new ideas” (as revealed in the Autobiography) 

were those of Comte and the Saint-Simonians, whose vision of reform was 

anchored in moral-political consensus under the tutelage of an intellectual 

elite. The mature Mill never rejected these ideas, although he would generally 

avoid grand historical theorizing and eschew (or conceal) the illiberal and 

utopian elements of his thought so evident in The Spirit of the Age. 

38 

On this point I am in agreement with Bruce Mazlish, who finds the essay “among the liveliest of 

Mill’s writings” (Mazlish, James and John Stuart Mill [New York: Basic Books, 1975], 240). 

39 

In the disjecta membra of the Autobiography, Mill recounts the dramatic reversal of his views on 

the problem of building social and political consensus among the multitude. After his baptism into 

Saint-Simonism, he “no longer believed that the fate of mankind depended on the possibility of making 

all of [the people] competent judges of questions of government and legislation. From this time my 

hopes of improvement rested less on the reason of the multitude, than on the possibility of effecting 

such an improvement in the method of political and social philosophy, as should enable all thinking 

and instructed persons who have no sinister interest to be so nearly of one mind on these subjects, as 

to carry the multitude with them by their united authority” (“Early Draft Rejected Leaves,” in CW, 

1:616). 

40 

In Mill’s first letter to Comte, a decade after The Spirit of the Age, he confirmed his radical credentials 

and expressed deep regret “that the revolutionary philosophy, which a dozen or so years ago still 

was in full swing, today has fallen into neglect before completing its task” (letter of Nov. 8, 1841, in 

The Correspondence of John Stuart Mill and Auguste Comte, trans. Oscar A. Haac [New Brunswick: 

Transaction, 1995], 36).


When the essays begin to appear in early 1831, Mill had already established 

himself in London as a formidable prodigy of reform both in print 

and in debate. Echoing the radical politics of his mentors, he argued in favor 

of frequent elections, reapportionment, an expanded franchise, free public 

education, free trade, a free press, and an end to religious disabilities, primogeniture, 

and entail. While Bentham had insisted that “radicalism [was] not 

dangerous,” young Mill suggested it might be just that, at least to the “sinister 

interests” of the privileged few. For example, in defending the interests of the 

working class—“the majority of the whole population”—he claims he would 

rather “suffer every other person in the community to starve, rather than 

[workers] should be inadequately provided with the necessaries of life.” 41 He 

also advocates the equal or near-equal distribution of wealth “which tends 

to the general happiness” and “the legislator ought to favor.” 42 Just how this 

could be achieved “in every way not inconsistent with that security of property” 

remains a mystery. 

Elsewhere Mill appears to flirt with revolution, even violent revolution, 

for “the idea of bloodless Revolution is, when rightly considered, visionary 

and absurd. All great Reforms must injure many private interests, and cannot, 

therefore, fail to raise many enemies.” While no advocate of mindless 

violence, he declares it “not mercy but weakness” to spare the enemies of 

the People. 43 He also calls for “the questioning of all established opinions,” 

particularly religious opinions, in the interest of progress and “the good of 

mankind,” and warmly anticipates “the downfall of the [established] church 

in my time.” 44 The reader of Mill’s early work will find a strain of dogmatism, 

elitism, and utopianism rarely associated with the author of On Liberty. Mill’s 

dogmatism is evident in a contempt for the “stupidity and vulgar prejudice” 

of obstructionists, while his elitism appears in the contrast he draws between 

“quack politicians” and the “scientific statesman”—a comparison which 

channels Plato’s Republic. Finally, there is Mill’s utopianism, his belief in the 

perfectibility of man and the indefinite improvement of society. According to 

Mill, “the wisest men of all political and religious opinions…have been something 

nearly approaching to perfectbilians.” Far from unhinged visionaries, 

41 

J. S. Mill, Journals and Debating Speeches, in CW, vol. 26, ed. John M. Robson (Toronto: University 

of Toronto Press, 1988), 369. 

42 

Ibid., 336, 337. 

43 

J. S. Mill, Newspaper Writings, in CW, vol. 22, ed. Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson (Toronto: 

University of Toronto Press, 1986), 42. 

44 

Journals and Debating Speeches, 350, and The Earlier Letters of John Stuart Mill, in CW, vol. 12, ed. 

Francis E. Mineka (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963), 28.


8 1 

such men understood that “an extremely high degree of moral and intellectual 

excellence may be made to prevail among mankind at large.” 45 

Mill was aware that such radical views would be met with incredulity, 

even outrage, among traditionalists and moderates alike. Before he withdrew 

from public disputation in 1829, he seemed to welcome the scorn that often 

greeted his more extreme statements. In one such outburst, he invited his 

opponents to think the worst of him: “I am content that they should call me 

radical, revolutionist, anarchist, jacobin, if they please. I am content to be 

treated as an enemy to establishments, to institutions, and to order.” 46 While 

clearly engaging in hyperbole, young Mill was sufficiently extreme to warrant 

such epithets in the minds of nonradicals, whether Whigs or Tories. As 

this phase represents Mill’s “apprenticeship,” 47 the next constitutes his “early” 

period (1830–1840) in which he rejected Benthamite orthodoxy, explored 

alternative philosophies, and expanded the scope of his intellectual and social 

universe. The Spirit of the Age is the first fruit of his own “transitional” phase, 

a striking departure from his earlier efforts, and a performance he never publicly 

repeated. Prior to this time, Mill (like Bentham and his father) tended to 

downplay the importance of past “experience” or history as a guide to practical 

reform—whether social, economic, political, or educational. Instead, the 

utilitarians looked to human nature and environment as the keys to societal 

amelioration. Based on an associationist psychology and a hedonistic theory 

of behavior, the Utilitarians believed in an almost limitless capacity to mold 

thought and direct conduct in accordance with the master principle of “the 

greatest happiness of the greatest number.” Mill never formally abandoned 

the utilitarian standard, but he did show a greater appreciation for history, 

particularly recent history, as a guide to practical reform. 

This newfound appreciation is apparent in the title Mill chose for his 

essays, which he borrowed from William Hazlitt, who had cited Ernst Arndt’s 

Der Geist der Zeit in the Examiner. (The term “zeitgeist,” often associated with 

but not used by Hegel, would thus enter into English usage.) For Mill, the 

“spirit” is not some metaphysical entity leaping across the centuries in the 

dialectical unfolding of mankind’s destiny, but more akin to the prevailing 

tendencies and historical movement of the times. Mill’s survey of current conditions 

led to the sweeping conclusion that the present “is an age of transition,” 

45 

Journals and Debating Speeches, 429–30. 

46 

Ibid., 262. 

47 

For an account of Mill’s “apprentice” years prior to The Spirit of the Age, see Quentin Taylor, “Radical 

Son: The Apprenticeship of John Stuart Mill,” Humanitas 26, nos. 1 and 2 (2013): 129–52.


or more specifically, that “the old order of things has become unsuited to the 

[current] state of society and the human mind” (1:230). The salient feature of 

the present age is contradiction, not as for Marx between the mode and relations 

of production, but between ideas or mental culture and outdated social, 

political, and economic doctrines, institutions, and practices. In short, Marx 

was a materialist, Mill an idealist. Both, however, drew radical consequences 

from their historical analysis. 48 While Mill says nothing of the Industrial Revolution 

or the rapid transformation of material life in 1830s Britain, he does 

predict that “the nineteenth century will be known to posterity as the era of 

one of the greatest revolutions of which history has preserved remembrance, in 

the human mind, and in the whole constitution of human society” (1:228–29). 

Mill was hardly alone in this grandiose prediction, and like Comte, Hegel, and 

Marx, he came to view history, and particularly recent history, as “the fountain 

of prophecy—the only key to the history of posterity” (1:229). 

And yet Mill never resigned himself to armchair divination, content 

to passively delight in the magisterial march of the “Spirit.” If the present 

is prologue to the future, it is also a call to action, for “only through 

[a knowledge of the present] is it in our power to influence that which is 

to come” (1:229). As such, Mill anticipated Marx, who famously declared, 

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; 

they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but circumstances 

directly found, given and transmitted from the past.” 49 Like Marx, 

Mill utterly rejected the status quo, denounced contemporary institutions 

as “vicious in both outline and in details,” and boldly announced that “they 

shall be renovated, and purified, and made fit for civilized man” (1:230). 

He did not, of course, embrace violent revolution, dictatorship of the proletariat, 

or abolition of private property, or dream away the existence of the 

state. 50 Moreover, there is a monumental dimension to Mill’s use of “history 

48 

Mill, like Marx, “looks forward to the day when progress by opposition will no longer be necessary, 

that is when positive truth in matters of morals and politics will be attained. The positivist, like 

the classical Marxist, believes in the relativity of all forms of thought except the ultimate one” (Ben 

Knights, “The Construction of Opinion: John Stuart Mill,” in The Idea of the Clerisy in the Nineteenth 

Century [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978], 162). 

49 

Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert 

C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 595. 

50 

Marx and Mill have been the subject of considerable comparative analysis. See Graeme Duncan, 

Marx and Mill: Two Views of Social Conflict and Social Harmony (Cambridge: Cambridge University 

Press, 1973), and Paul Smart, Marx and Mill: Individual Liberty and Roads to Freedom (Manchester: 

Manchester University Press, 1991).


8 3 

for life” that is missing in Marx—like Nietzsche, Mill reserved an honored 

place for talent and genius. 51 

The specific measures advanced by the Radicals were part of a larger 

program to reform a corrupt and outmoded society by removing the “antiquated,” 

the “irrational,” and the “sinister” from the body politic. Mill 

embraced an even loftier vision that soared beyond political action to behold 

the more distant vistas of social transformation. In doing so, he overshot key 

articles of the Benthamite creed. The Spirit of the Age, which neither calls 

for specific reforms nor bewails the abuses of the times, embodies this transcendent 

flight. For Mill, present reform efforts are “but indications which 

tell of a more vital and radical change” to come (1:230). The old doctrines, 

institutions, and leaders have fallen into disrepute, but society still awaits the 

imposition of the new. Such “vital” and “radical” change will entail more 

than simply correcting the most flagrant abuses and tinkering with “the 

machine.” “Society demands…not merely a new machine, but a new machine 

constructed in another manner” (1:231). Clearly Mill envisioned a comprehensive 

program that would not merely reform society, but transform it from 

what it was into what it might be—indeed, into what it had never been before: 

“the state of society I contemplate has never yet had existence.” 52 

Mill likens the present lack of consensus in “doctrine” (whether political 

or moral) to a state of “intellectual anarchy” (1:233). Men may discuss and 

reason more than ever before but it has not made them a great deal wiser: 

abandoning false doctrines does not insure their replacement by true ones. 53 

Unlike nonphilosophical (“plebeian”) reformers, Mill did not congratulate 

the mass of his “thinking and reading” countrymen on their newfound 

enlightenment. In a paraphrase of Burke (whom he both hated and admired), 

Mill writes: “Before I compliment a man or a generation upon having got rid 

51 

On the basis of his elitist cultural politics, Mill has been placed in the nineteenth-century tradition 

of “aristocratic liberalism,” alongside Tocqueville and Burkhardt, neither of whom, however, indulged 

in Mill’s utopian scientism. See Alfred S. Kahan, Aristocratic Liberalism: The Social and Political 

Thought of Jacob Burkhardt, John Stuart Mill, and Alexis de Toqueville (Oxford: Oxford University 

Press, 1992). Nietzsche, who excoriated Mill and English utilitarianism, espoused a more virulent 

form of cultural elitism which bypassed liberalism altogether. See Bruce Detwiler, Nietzsche and the 

Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 

52 

Journals and Debating Speeches, 305. 

53 

In a letter to Thomas Carlyle, who referred to the author of The Spirit of the Age as a “new mystic,” 

Mill dismissed the idea that “truth will out” through unfettered expression in the marketplace of 

ideas. “I have not any great notion of the advantage of what the ‘free discussion’ men call the ‘collision 

of opinions,’ it being my creed that the Truth is sown and germinates in the mind itself, and is not to 

be struck out suddenly like fire from a flint by knocking another hard body against it” (letter of May 

18, 1833, in Earlier Letters, 153).


of their prejudices, I require to know what they have substituted in lieu of 

them” (1:233). Ideally, the many will come to embrace “true opinions” in matters 

of morals and politics—a solution strikingly similar to the one adopted 

in Plato’s Republic. Since the many can never be philosophically enlightened 

(i.e., understand the grounds of their knowledge), they must be brought to 

accept true opinions instead. 54 

Precisely what makes a moral or political opinion “true” or “false” Mill 

does not say. As a Utilitarian, he presumably agreed with the Burkean formulation 

of the nature of moral and political phenomena. “Political problems do 

not primarily concern truth or falsehood. They relate to good [happiness] or 

evil [unhappiness]. What in the result is likely to produce evil [unhappiness] 

is politically false; that which is productive of good [happiness], politically 

true.” 55 Yet Mill espoused a more rigorous, scientific notion of moral and 

political truth, and adopted something like the principle of falsifiability as 

a standard of verification. On the other hand, he suggests that “true” and 

“false” opinions may be so “originally,” or may “become so by change of 

circumstances” (1:233). In either case, it is clear that Mill believed morals 

and politics were “sciences” capable of rational demonstration. This belief is 

among the most distinct and curious features of The Spirit of the Age and 

of Mill’s philosophy in general. Near the end of the first essay he notes that 

just as “physical science” is advancing in truth, so too “the moral and social 

sciences” (1:234). That the parallel between physical and social science is not 

merely analogical is revealed in the second essay. Here Mill takes the former 

as the model for the latter, not so much as a method of discovering truth but 

for the consensus it has generated among scientists and the authority it exercises 

over the layman’s “thoughts and…actions.” It is precisely this consensus 

and authority in the physical sciences that Mill sets as the goal of the moral 

and social sciences; indeed, it is “what is to be hoped for and laboured for in 

all other departments of human knowledge; and what, beyond all possibility 

of doubt, will one day be attained” (2:239). 

Did Mill’s vision of a robust social science include the creation of a new 

orthodoxy in morals and politics as an anodyne to the “intellectual anarchy” 

54 

I am hardly alone in noting the strongly Platonic flavor of Mill’s elitist intellectualism. “Mill thus 

refloats the Platonic distinction between knowledge (which pertains to an elite) and opinion (which 

pertains to the masses) upon positivist waters. He is dealing with one of the outstanding problems of 

an advanced society…but his solution runs perilously close to the devaluation of any but philosophic 

knowledge. Common sense and the judgment of the half-instructed are dangerous” (Knights, Idea of 

the Clerisy, 147). 

55 

Edmund Burke, “An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs,” in Further Reflections on the Revolution 

in France, ed. Daniel E. Ritchie (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1992), 163.


8 5 

of the present? Even before his encounter with the Saint-Simonians, Mill 

accepted the Benthamite conviction that politics, like morals, could be 

reduced to a science, as well as the principle of elite intellectual leadership. 

In The Spirit of the Age, he greatly expanded on these notions under the spell 

of Comtean historicism. The scientism Mill had absorbed under the tutelage 

of Bentham and his father hypertrophied under the influence of Comte, and 

found expression in a yearning for a kind of “intellectual directorate” in the 

public arena, albeit one accepted voluntarily by the half- and uninstructed 

many. 56 The realm of physical science, where “we never hear of the right of 

private judgment,” represents the model to which social science must aspire 

(2:239). In the present “transitional” state, the instructed are themselves 

divided on questions of morals and politics, and the “uninstructed lose 

their faith in them” (2:228). This is not altogether regrettable, for it begets an 

increase in “discussion” and “private judgment,” and removes a good deal 

of nonsense in public opinion. As such it is a necessary step in the march of 

mankind toward a new and better “natural” state of society. 57 

A leading feature of this new social order—indeed, what makes it possible—is 

a consensus among the learned on morals and politics. This consensus 

will be passed on to the laity in the form of a body of “received opinion” on all 

matters touching the common good (2:240). Just as the nonscientific public 

readily accepts the authority of professional scientists, so the nonphilosophic 

many will come to accept the authority of professional philosophers—once 

they themselves reach agreement on social doctrine. But why is this both 

necessary and “natural”? In the first essay, Mill asserts that social progress 

is dependent upon the leadership of the few and the willingness of the many 

to follow them: “if the multitude of one age are nearer to the truth than the 

multitude of another, it is only so far as they are guided and influenced by the 

authority of the wisest among them” (1:234). The many are disqualified from 

acquiring true wisdom not so much from any inherent defectiveness as from 

the necessity of daily toil—as such, the vast majority will be half-educated at 

best. This leaves the field of social and moral science open to those with the 

56 

As the leading study of Mill’s encounter with French thought concludes, Mill “came dangerously 

close to an acceptance of the intellectual directorate, actually the intellectual dictatorship, which the 

Saint-Simonians and Comte purported to be the means of achieving a cohesive society” (Iris W. Mueller, 

John Stuart Mill and French Thought [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956], 69). 

57 

As he explained to a friend and fellow traveler, “In the present age of transition, everything must 

be subordinate to freedom of inquiry: if your opinions, or mine, are right, they will in time be unanimously 

adopted by the instructed classes, and then it will be time to found the national creed upon the 

assumption of their truth” (Mill to John Sterling, Oct. 20–22, 1831, in Earlier Letters, 77).


intelligence and leisure to “dedicate themselves to the investigation and study 

of physical, moral, and social truths, as their peculiar calling” (2:242). 

Will such elites occupy an “official” position in the future polity? Will 

they constitute a kind of Royal Society or Brain Trust? Even earlier Mill had 

rejected the idea of an official cognoscenti and he never assigns them such a 

role in The Spirit of the Age. 58 Yet he never renounced the desirability of an 

intellectual elite (Comte’s pouvoir spirituel) as a quasi-authoritative body of 

opinion makers. Given his assumptions about the nature of social and moral 

knowledge it was logically required that he retain a place for such a body in 

his public philosophy. If mankind’s progress requires a return to a “natural” 

state characterized by agreement on “nearly the whole field of the moral relations 

of man,” there must be “a large body of received doctrine…which no 

one thinks of questioning, backed as it is by the authority of all, or nearly all, 

supposed to possess knowledge enough to qualify them for giving an opinion 

on the subject” (2:244–45). It is the especial role of those so qualified to provide 

this doctrine and render it authoritative for the uninitiated. 

While Mill stresses the importance of general compliance with “received 

doctrine” as handed down by social philosophers, he does not advocate 

“slavish deference” to their teaching. In this he is not entirely consistent. Mill 

advises the layman to “think for yourself” but only with the understanding 

that doing so will rarely lead to a knowledge of the philosophical grounds 

(the ultimate reasons) upon which received doctrine rests (2:241). (Just why 

the possession of philosophical knowledge by a directing elite is necessary 

for human progress Mill never explains.) Where his understanding ends, the 

layman must place his trust in the judgment of his intellectual betters, and 

defer to “the authority of those who have made moral and social philosophy 

their peculiar study” (2:244). Moreover, the injunction to “think for yourself” 

is for Mill less a call to independence of judgment than the proviso of 

a “transitional” age—a temporary indulgence that will progressively yield to 

a habitual deference to a “united body of grave and commanding authority.” 

“Learn, and think for yourself, is reasonable advice for the day: but let not the 

business of the day be so done as to prejudice the work of tomorrow” (2:245). 59 

58 

Mill’s elite would not be drawn from the current establishment or imposed from above, but exercise 

an “insensible influence of mind over mind” through “private communication, the pulpit, & the press” 

(Mill to Gustave d’Eichthal, Nov. 7, 1829, in Earlier Letters, 41). Otherwise, “the social setting of this 

elite remained extremely vague” but no less necessary for this fact (Van Holthoon, Road to Utopia, 

117). 

59 

In his correspondence, Mill was even more dismissive of the dictum “think for yourself” and the 

pretensions of l’homme moyen sensuel to intellectual independence. He had little more than contempt


8 7 

And what is the work of tomorrow? Nothing, it would seem, short of “a 

moral and social revolution.” For Mill the first stages of this revolution will 

prepare the ground for the consensus of elites and herald the beginning of the 

new, “natural” age. The precise relation between the two is unclear, but Mill 

openly relishes the coming reign of elites: “the first men of the age will one day 

join hands and be agreed: and then there is no power on earth or in hell itself, 

capable of withstanding them” (2:245). If the reign of elites is Mill’s Pentecost, 

the Revolution is his Advent. 

But ere this can happen there must be a change in the whole framework 

of society, as at present constituted. Worldly power must pass from the 

hands of the stationary part of mankind into those of the progressive 

part. There must be a moral and social revolution, which shall, indeed, 

take away no men’s lives or property, but which shall leave to no man 

one fraction of unearned distinction or unearned importance. (2:245) 

Again, it is difficult to see how a “change in the whole framework of 

society,” the transfer of “worldly power,” and a “moral and social revolution,” 

could leave “men’s lives or property” undisturbed. Even before The Spirit of 

the Age, Mill had declared himself in favor of nationalization of land and the 

redistribution of wealth, and proclaimed “the idea of a bloodless Revolution… 

visionary and absurd. All great Reforms must injure many private interests.” 

Perhaps Mill simply hoped that radical reforms, like those of Solon and Cleisthenes, 

might be effected without undue violence or social upheaval. Perhaps 

he was simply too vague, for he neither provides historical examples nor specifies 

the relation between the means and ends of the envisioned transformation. 

Mill is, however, clear about its desirability, indeed, its historical necessity, for 

“man cannot achieve his destiny but through such a transformation, and that 

it will and shall be effected” (2:245). And while it may be “a fearful thing” to 

contemplate such profound changes, the “force of circumstances” rather than 

the “wisdom of mankind” will likely point out “the easiest and most obvious” 

course “in a moment of emergency.” This historical resolution, like the deus 

ex machina of antique drama, fits uneasily with Mill’s Enlightenment faith in 

the ability of reason to shape mankind’s destiny. 

In the third essay, Mill expands on the characteristics of the “natural” 

and the “transitional” state. The former is ascendant when “worldly power” 

and “moral influence” are united in the hands of the most capable and 

for “making every man his own guide & sovereign-master, & letting him think for himself & do 

exactly as he judges best for himself, giving other men leave to persuade him if they can by evidence, 

but forbidding him to give way to authority” (Mill to John Sterling, Oct. 20–22, 1831, in Earlier Letters, 

84).


qualified, and when the many acquiesce in their authority (3:252). An inversion 

of this condition prevails in a “transitional” state where worldly power 

is exercised by the less fit, and moral influence is blunted by the “chaos” of 

opinions. This is the condition Britain (and most of Europe) finds itself in. 

“And this [state] continues until a moral and social revolution (or it may 

be, a series of such) has replaced worldly power and moral influence in the 

hands of the most competent: when society is once more in its natural state, 

and resumes its onward progress” (3:253). Mill distinguishes his vision of 

“onward progress” from that of “plebeian” reformers who merely seek to 

transfer power and resources from one social class to another. His vision is 

more radical and wide-ranging: it encompassed a moral and social reform 

well beyond piecemeal political and economic adjustment. Mill envisioned a 

spiritual reformation of epochal significance culminating in the “regeneration 

of mankind.” Years later, in “The Stationary State” (1848), he would adumbrate 

his vision of the fully humanized society. 60 

While rhapsodizing over the shape of things to come, young Mill espied 

the advent of a new and final stage of historical development. As a committed 

believer in “the doctrine of the indefinite progressiveness of the human 

mind” (1:234), he beheld few limits to the heights to which humanity might 

soar. While perhaps not as utopian as Marx, he did project a state of affairs 

highly favorable to “rapid advancement” and foresaw an emerging social climate 

superior to “counteracting forces” hostile to further progress (3:253). 

Both thinkers also adopted a historicist philosophy of human development 

(Mill from Comte, Marx from Hegel) with revolutionary and millenarian 

consequences. Mill’s version even shares a dialectical aspect insofar as he 

conceives the movement of history in terms of conflict and contradiction, and 

projects its advance (prior to its final stage) without humanity’s conscious or 

collective effort. Finally, both envisaged this final stage through an eschatological 

lens—the quantitative giving place to the qualitative, the first chapter 

in mankind’s true history. It is unlikely that Mill had read Hegel (who died in 

the same year The Spirit of the Age appeared) but progressive-historicist ideas 

were in the air. “The institutions of our ancestors served passably well for 

our ancestors, and that from no wisdom of theirs; but from a cause to which, 

I am afraid, nearly all the good institutions which have ever existed, owed 

their origin, namely the force of circumstances” (3:257). While not quite “the 

60 

“The Stationary State,” a brief chapter in the famed Principles of Political Economy, is a striking (if 

overlooked) testament to the sincerity and persistence of Mill’s utopian aspirations. See CW, vol. 3, ed. 

John Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963), 753–57.


8 9 

cunning of reason,” Mill’s “force of circumstances” moves men to act in ways 

unreflective of conscious goals, much less “wisdom.” 61 

For Mill, the ever-growing conviction that the current elite was unfit to 

wield worldly power signaled the death-rattle of the old order and the eclipse 

of the transitional age. From here it was but a step to “see a termination to 

hereditary monarchy and hereditary aristocracy.” Mill does not call for their 

termination as such, for they are already marked for extinction: “the ultimate 

fate of such distinctions [of rank] is already decided” (3:280, 281). The survival 

of both into the twenty-first century (if only in titular form) may have surprised 

Mill. He was correct in predicting their functional demise within a few 

generations, but it is doubtful that he would view their successors as greatly 

superior. This aside, Mill was convinced that no substantial improvement in 

conditions was possible until the current ruling class (whose power resided in 

landed and commercial wealth) was replaced by a “natural” elite composed of 

the most competent, learned, and principled members of society. 

So when did the last “natural” age end and the present “transitional” age 

begin? Mill is short and vague on details, but he does identify the Christian 

Middle Ages as “natural,” both with respect to worldly power and moral 

influence. He is, however, far from glorifying medieval society as had become 

de rigueur among European Romantics. Compared to the present age, the 

medieval era was “a rude age,” rife with violence, brutality, ignorance, and 

superstition (3:256). And yet the princes and prelates who then ruled were in 

fact the best the times could afford, if woefully inadequate by any enlightened 

standard. Here we find Mill at his most historicist and relativist. It may have 

been possible, for example, to “conceive” the idea of “responsible government” 

in the Middle Ages, but “it could not have been realized. Several antecedent 

stages in civilization had previously to be passed through” (3:257). Mill 

appears to have injected a dose of materialism into his idealist philosophy. 

Do ideas drive the Geist or do material-social conditions? Is there a pattern, 

or “law” of historical development? In passing, Mill does contrast the “law” 

of prescription (or hereditary right) with the “law” of how “political power 

descends” (3:258). The latter is not (as it was for Hegel) a metaphysical process 

in which human beings act as unwitting tools of a higher purpose, but rather 

a function of merit fitted to circumstances, and working on behalf of human 

progress. Their differences aside, the visions of the two thinkers share much 

61 

Comparisons of Mill and Hegel are understandably rare, but as Ronald Beiner notes, “J. S. Mill’s 

political thought is fundamentally synthetic; not unlike Hegel, he takes opposing perspectives and 

tries to forge them into an encompassing whole” (“John Stuart Mill’s Project,” 266).


in common: both found the meaning of history in the unfolding of reason 

and the fulfillment of mankind’s destiny in a rationally directed society. 

In the fourth and fifth essays, Mill turns from “worldly power” to “moral 

influence” as traditionally exercised by the wise and virtuous (real or supposed), 

the clergy, and the rulers themselves (4:290). Throughout the Middle 

Ages these three sources of moral influence largely reinforced one another. 62 

The onset of the Reformation spelled the end of moral consensus among 

elites in much of Europe, including England. According to Mill, England got 

along “tolerably well” until the Glorious Revolution, after which the quality of 

leadership went into marked decline (5:314). With this verdict Mill turns the 

famous Whig interpretation of history on its head. Far from ushering in an 

era of national greatness or securing the “rights of Englishmen,” post-Stuart 

Britain seethed with fainant kings, feckless aristocrats, and a parasitic clergy. 

For Mill, the seventeenth century was the great age of English statesmanship, 

when “the expression, natural leaders of the people [still] has some meaning” 

(3:282). The expression was now emptied of all meaning. The conditions of 

leadership in a “natural” society “have now ceased to be fulfilled” (5:314). 

Did Mill point to any other Western societies, before or after the Middle 

Ages, that approximated a “natural” state of society? The ancient commonwealths 

of Athens and Rome—in their best periods—are cited as past 

examples, the United States as a living one. Mill’s discussion of these is cursory 

and superficial but underscores his obsession with the moral and political 

authority of a “natural” elite. In Athens and Rome this authority was rooted 

in “the wisdom of the ancestors.” “The authority of the ancestors, so deeply 

reverenced at Athens and Rome, was the authority of the best and wisest men 

for many successive generations” (4:291, 293). Mill’s emphasis on ancestral 

authority stands in sharp contrast to his radical and repeated attacks on the 

“dead hand” of tradition. In spite of his democratic rhetoric (which was not 

always at one with his logic), Mill justified moral and political authority based 

on merit, for in these ancient commonwealths ancestral authority did not 

exceed its “just weight,” nor “supersede reason, but guided it” (4:293). 

Mill’s comments on the United States, which he never visited, betray a 

superficial familiarity with its history and politics. Determined to find a “natural” 

congruity between a people and its leaders, he cites Americans’ wise 

choice of presidents and their collective satisfaction “with their institutions, 

62 

As Van Holthoon notes, Mill’s “interpretation of medieval history is highly problematical, but historical 

truth is not the point of it. The interpretation served the purpose of prophecy” (Road to Utopia, 

113).


9 1 

and their rulers” (3:254). Apparently Mill was unfamiliar with the tumultuous 

politics of the 1790s and beyond—the heated rivalries, bitter partisanship, 

and sectionalism that would in time tear the nation apart. 

Most astonishing, however, is Mill’s identification of the medieval Catholic 

clergy as a prototype of moral influence in a “natural” state of society. 63 

In the fifth essay, Mill—agnostic, anticlerical, and disestablishmentarian—examines 

the clergy as a spiritual (as opposed to a temporal) source of 

moral authority “sufficient to extort acquiescence from the uninquiring, or 

uninformed majority” (5:304–5). As with the medieval nobility, Mill makes 

no attempt to excuse or conceal the abuses of the church. The whitewashing 

brush is provided by Comtean historicism, for whatever its abuses the 

“Catholic clergy…were, in point of fact, the fittest persons who could have 

possessed” moral authority at the time (5:306). Vices aside—though “great 

and flagrant”—the clergy were a “civilizing and humanizing” force in a society 

that lacked the means of producing anything better. What Mill admired 

about the Catholic clergy was its possession of moral influence based on 

superior learning and a paternal, universalist ethic. At their best, priests and 

prelates were protohumanists who preserved classical learning, admonished 

the rich and powerful, comforted the poor and lowly, and provided a necessary 

degree of moral coherence for a “rude age.” Like Comte, whose own 

Utopia was led by a faux catholique priesthood, Mill toyed with the idea of an 

(unofficial) “clerisy” that would serve much the same function as the medieval 

clergy. 64 

Inculcating the natural equality of mankind, and the superiority of 

love and sacrifice above mere courage and bodily prowess, for menacing 

the great with the only terrors to which they were accessible, and 

speaking to their consciences in the name of the only superior whom 

they acknowledged, in behalf of the low. (5:306) 

Of course, Mill’s clerisy will have jettisoned the theological trappings 

of Christianity and presumably have no authority to punish those who run 

afoul of the Religion of Humanity. The power to damn and burn is “by no 

means one of those peculiarities of a natural state of society which I am at all 

63 

The idea of a “clerisy,” the rule of the learned and wise, was developed by Coleridge, and shared 

strong affinities with the intellectual elitism of Comte. Mill zestfully imbibed and critically engaged 

both thinkers following his break with orthodox Benthamism. See Knights, Idea of the Clerisy, 

140–77. 

64 

It is “astonishing” in terms of Mill’s hostility to the Established Church, the clergy, and revealed 

religion, as well his Benthamite scorn for the Middle Ages. Like so much “new” in The Spirit of the 

Age, Mill’s departure in this regard owed much to his encounter with Comte and Coleridge.


anxious to see restored” (3:305). (This is the single droll comment in an otherwise 

humorless tract.) 65 Yet as Mill observes in On Liberty and elsewhere, 

moral suasion in the form of shame and ostracism will serve a similar function 

in the future secularized society. 66 In The Spirit of the Age, however, the 

relationship between the clerisy and the unlearned is more happily likened to 

that of a benign Scots pastor and his lay neighbor, who “defers…though with 

no slavish deference, to the opinions of his minister.” And why? Because he 

freely recognizes the minister as 

more versed in the particular subject—as being probably a wiser, and 

possibly, a better man than himself. This is not the influence of an 

interpreter of religion, as such; it is that of a purer heart, and a more 

cultivated intelligence. It is not the ascendancy of a priest: it is the 

combined authority of a professor of religion, and an esteemed private 

friend. (5:312–13). 

Even in this example, it is not religious, but intellectual and moral superiority 

that accounts for the pastor’s influence and the deference of the layman. 

(Here Mill suggestively conceives elite tutelage and lay deference in terms 

of “combined authority”—a reciprocal and affective, if asymmetrical, social 

bond.) Mill hastens to add that this model of relations, while applicable to 

other dissenting sects in England, is not applicable to the state-backed Established 

Church, which he condemns as a “kind of appendage of the aristocracy” 

(5:313). As noted above, young Mill anticipated disestablishment in his lifetime, 

an event that would help clear the ground for the “moral and social 

revolution” looming on the horizon. The ruling classes had long forfeited the 

privilege of ruling, “they have flung away their advantages,” and the people 

at large are ripe for “self-government; for the rational management of their 

own affairs” (5:315, 314). Yet the nation’s entrenched and privileged few retain 

sufficient power to impede the proliferation of new “received doctrines” and 

generally obstruct the march of humanity. Mill concludes The Spirit of the 

Age with a resounding call for the removal of such “sinister interests.” 

They must, therefore, be divested of the monopoly of worldly power, 

ere the most virtuous and best-instructed of the nation will acquire 

that ascendancy over the opinions and feelings of the rest, by which 

alone England can emerge from this crisis of transition, and enter 

once again into a natural state of society. (5:316) 

65 

The “comical seriousness” that a contemporary observed in Mill’s moral and intellectual fastidiousness 

was perceived to issue from a mind possessed of “that eschatological sense that leads so easily to a 

humorless earnestness felt to be required by the historical crisis” (Knights, Idea of the Clerisy, 154). 

66 

This feature of Mill’s “liberalism,” so at odds with his reputation as a moral pluralist in the realm of 

“self-regarding” acts, has been thoroughly documented in Hamburger, John Stuart Mill, 166–202.


9 3 

Mill was here referring to the pending Reform Bill, but electoral reform 

was but a first step. His gaze was fixed on a posterity that few of his contemporaries 

could imagine, much less grasp. It will take “a far deeper insight into 

the futurity which waits for us” to see beyond current reform efforts. It will 

require an acute understanding of national character, “a careful survey of the 

English national mind” (5:316) to discern the “future fate of our country.” 

This in turn will require a new science, what Mill calls ethology, the science 

of character formation in both the individual and collective (national) sense. 

Such a science will give educators (and the intellectual elite who train them) 

the ultimate tool in molding the thoughts and actions of the laity: “When the 

circumstances of an individual or of a nation are in any considerable degree 

under our control, we may, by our knowledge of tendencies, be enabled to 

shape those circumstances in a manner much more favorable to the ends we 

desire.” 67 Mill would outline this character-forming science in his System of 

Logic (1843) where physical science is again hailed as the model for moral 

and social science: “The backward state of the Moral Sciences can only be remedied 

by applying to them the methods of Physical Science, duly extended and 

generalized.” 68 Although Mill never carried out this task, his outline of ethology 

links the Logic with The Spirit of the Age, the young with the mature Mill, 

who nourished the vision of an intellectual-scientific elite as the repository 

of moral and social authority. 69 The author of the Logic may have exchanged 

his revolutionary rhetoric for the language of science, but as the following 

passage illustrates, it was but old wine in new bottles. 

As the strongest propensities of uncultivated or half-cultivated human 

nature (being purely selfish ones, and those of a sympathetic character 

which partake most of the nature of selfishness) evidently tend 

in themselves to disunite mankind, not to unite them,—to make 

them rivals, not confederates; social existence is only possible by a 

disciplining of those more powerful propensities, which consists in 

subordinating them to a common system of opinions. The degree of 

this subordination is the measure of the completeness of the social 

union, and the nature of the common opinions determines its kind. 

67 

J. S. Mill, A System of Logic, in CW, vol. 8, ed. John M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto 

Press, 1974), 869. 

68 

Ibid., 833. 

69 

Based on a thorough study of Mill’s works and correspondence, Raeder concludes that “there is no 

reason to believe he ever fully disavowed either Saint-Simon’s philosophy of history or his conception 

of a spiritual power” (John Stuart Mill, 47). Mill may have removed a number of admiring references 

to Comte in successive editions of the Logic but (as T. R. Wright notes) “his substantial reliance on 

Comte for historical method remained unaltered” (Wright, The Religion of Humanity: The Impact of 

Comtean Positivism on Victorian Britain [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986], 41).


But in order that mankind should conform their actions to any set of 

opinions, these opinions must exist, must be believed by them. And 

thus, the state of the speculative faculties, the character of the propositions 

assented to by the intellect, essentially determines the moral 

and political state of the community, as we have already seen that it 

determines the physical. 70 

Scholars will continue to disagree over the persistence of this intoxicating 

vision—and the presence of certain “illiberal” features—in Mill’s thought, 

but The Spirit of the Age will remain the touchstone for those who contend 

that “[the] lines of his future work were there laid down.” 71 

70 

System of Logic, 926. 

71 

Letwin, Pursuit of Certainty, 269.

Book Review: Thucydides and the Pursuit of Freedom 

9 5 

Mary P. Nichols, Thucydides and the Pursuit of Freedom. Ithaca, NY: Cornell 

University Press, 2015, vii + 196 pp., $49.95 (hardcover). 

Democracy as a Means of Ascent 

Jo s e p h A lu l i s 

North Park University 

jalulis@northpark.edu 

Hobbes called Thucydides “the most politic historiographer that ever writ.” 1 

If by that he meant that no historian has ever described the activity of politics 

better or reflected upon it more deeply, then Mary P. Nichols agrees. The 

title of her book conveys her interpretation of the fruits of that reflection. 

Through the eyes of Thucydides, the war between Athens and Sparta and 

politics as a whole are best seen in terms of a “pursuit of freedom.” 

In her introduction Nichols discusses Thucydides’s activity in writing up 

the war and weighs the competing interpretations of his aims and accomplishment. 

In the conclusion she considers Thucydides as a member of a political 

community and treats his digressions in his account of the war as speeches 

of his own like those he attributes to other Athenian citizens (170). The five 

chapters in between divide into two groups. The first two chapters present 

the democratic Athens of Pericles and Diodotus as an image of freedom to be 

emulated by future generations “for all time.” In the last three chapters she 

considers two campaigns of the war, Spartan and Athenian respectively, as 

ventures in pursuit of freedom that had disastrous consequences owing to a 

want of measure in their commanders. From first to last, she shows Thucydides’s 

concern with the actions of citizens and statesmen. 

1 

Hobbes’s Thucydides, ed. Richard Schlatter (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1975), 7. 



In the introduction, Nichols distinguishes her approach from both modernists 

and postmodernists or constructivisits. Thucydides gives us not a 

simple “empirical account of what happened” but an interpretation (9). But 

“everything cannot be interpretation. If it were, interpretation would be neither 

necessary nor possible” (12). She also distinguishes herself from some scholars 

“influenced by” Strauss on the distance “between the city’s self-understanding 

and the one available to Thucydides.” Just as Thucydides shares in “the 

restraints of time and place” that limit the view of citizens and statesmen, so 

they are “more able to share in his freedom” of vision than some think (14). 

Nichols sees in the Athens of Pericles’s funeral oration a model for our 

use. As evidence that Thucydides intended us to see it in his way she notes 

that he portrays Pericles “as his own model in writing his history” (47). What 

sets Athens apart and makes it the school of Hellas is the free way of life 

its democracy makes possible. Freedom means that human beings are “a 

cause of actions” and not simply moved by the compulsion of nature (5–6, 

26). What accounts for human freedom is the faculty of speech or reason 

and the deliberation it makes possible. “Deliberation gains distance from the 

compulsion of passion” (53). Hence “freedom is a potential, not a necessity, 

although it is necessary for full humanity” because it “is the condition of 

human excellence” (26, 27). The freedom they enjoy means that the virtue of 

Athenians comes “from within themselves”; it is not a matter of “the compulsion 

of the law” as is the case with Sparta (35, 34, 176). 

Freedom hangs in the balance in the Mytilenean debate not simply 

because of Cleon’s attack on speech and deliberation (55) but also because 

of Diodotus’s argument that desire and hope overcome every rational calculation 

of the good (61). Nichols gives a valuable summary of the range of 

interpretation of Diodotus’s speech (65–67), so critical because she, like other 

commentators, sees Diodotus as expressing the thought of Thucydides (65, 

68). She argues that implicit in Diodotus’s argument is a warning about the 

power of eros and hope among the Athenians themselves, soon to be seen in 

the case of Sicily, and giving such a warning “implies the possibilities of resisting 

and overcoming the irrational passions that lead to doom” (63). Moreover, 

she adduces evidence that Diodotus does not think justice as irrelevant as he 

claims and observes that what Diodotus recommends as advantage is that 

Athens be “more lenient than justice requires,” in effect, that Athens act with 

equity (67), and equity is a form of justice. 2 

2 

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1137a32–1138a3. Nichols notes the importance of epieikeia for the 

position of the Athenians who speak in Sparta (56, 62).

Book Review: Thucydides and the Pursuit of Freedom 

9 7 

For Nichols, by the juxtaposition of the cases of Mytilene and Plataea, 

the latter city falling to Sparta, “Thucydides shows the superiority of Athens” 

(74). In part this involves the fact that Sparta fails to aid its ally Mytilene 

because of its poor use of time while strategic considerations prevent Athens 

from aiding Plataea (74, 76). But she does not consider the case of the Spartan 

general Salaethus, captured in Mytilene, who promised to secure the safety 

of Plataea if he is spared (Thuc. 3.36.1). 3 Instead, the Athenians summarily 

execute him. Given the enormous weight Sparta gives to the lives of Spartiates, 

Salaethus’s offer is to be taken seriously. It is ironic that in this case, 

Athens does just what it advised the Plataeans not to do in the case of its 

Theban prisoners at the start of war, namely, proceed “to extremities” (Thuc. 

2.6.2). And it is precisely the summary execution of their captives by the Plataeans 

that makes the Thebans so determined when the city falls to see that 

they forfeit their lives (Thuc. 3.66.2). 

The campaigns of Brasidas into Thrace and of Athens against Sicily are 

both, in different ways, in pursuit of freedom. As every successful going out 

implies a safe return, the failure of Brasidas to return to Sparta and the failed 

homecoming of the Athenian expedition mark both as flawed. In the first 

case Sparta is insufficiently like Athens to support liberation in Thrace (79). 

What Sparta fears most at home is the “new thing” (neōterizein) Brasidas 

offers the cities of Thrace (104, 91n16, 95). Brasidas is too free, that is, too 

independent of his city (79, 104, 138). But his combination of daring and 

intelligence makes him so unlike the Spartans that a return would be less a 

true homecoming than is his official internment in Amphipolis (102, 103). 

Significantly, Nichols notes, the only other public funeral of which Thucydides 

writes is that of the Athenians killed in the first year of the war (102). 

Brasidas represents a noble view of his city (80, 96), but by being too free, he 

contributes to Scione suffering at the hands of Athens the same fate as Melos 

(103). This “great cost” of Brasidas’s failure is an instance of the tragedy not of 

politics as such but of political life in his time and place (80). 

A similar lack of “measure” as regards freedom, Nichols argues, causes 

the failure of the Sicilian campaign (133). The “eros for sailing away” that 

initiates the campaign is rightly described by Nicias as diseased (19, 125, 

125n37). Alcibiades arouses this diseased desire and he, like Brasidas, is 

too free; though by Athenian standards, Brasidas is moderate, by the same 

3 

References to Thucydides are to The Landmark Thucydides, ed. Robert B. Strassler (New York: 

Simon and Schuster, 1996).


standard Alcibiades represents a true excess. 4 When Alcibiades chooses to 

flee rather than, like Socrates, face charges of impiety in Athens (142), the 

army is entrusted to Nicias who is insufficiently free (21, 140, 149). Nicias is 

more Spartan than Athenian (139). While Brasidas’s noble but unsupported 

campaign to liberate the Thracian cities is an unwise pursuit of freedom, 

the Athenian campaign against Sicily is neither noble nor wise. But if the 

splendid Athens of the first four books is eclipsed by that of the last four, 

Thucydides has nonetheless left us a record of it for our admiration (183–84). 

Nichols sees Thucydides’s two digressions, correcting the popular idea 

of Aristogeiton and Harmodious as tyrant slayers and recounting the flight 

from Athens and return of Themistocles, as teaching a lesson of moderation 

(173). Thucydides presents himself as a “model of political restraint” (174). 5 

In the case of Themistocles, this moderation appears in the contrast with 

Nicias and Alcibiades; Themistocles finds the balance between attachment 

and independence from his political community (178–79). If a people’s aspiration 

for freedom is to prove beneficial, the statesmen who guide them must 

possess this virtue (174). 

Insofar as philosophy “begins in wonder,” Thucydides is to be understood 

as a philosophic as well as a politic historian: his work records the deeds of a 

city “worthy of wonder” (35, 58, 79). He is, as Nichols puts it, more concerned 

with the distinctive than with the universal; the universal in politics is what 

is true “for the most part” and serves as a foil for the distinctive as admirable. 

If most are moved by fear and interest, some act for honor and justice (179). 

In the words of the Athenian poet Sophocles, “Many are the wonders, none is 

more wonderful than what is man.” What makes man a wonder is the capacity 

for freedom which is the condition for liberal and generous actions such as 

that which distinguishes the unnamed wife of Admetus (176). 

Nichols acknowledges her debt to other scholars, noting it throughout, 

and makes a valuable contribution to that body of scholarship. Her book 

offers an imaginative and closely reasoned interpretation of Thucydides 

which abounds in insightful observation. While this review traces some 

themes, much more worthy of note awaits the reader. 

4 

Cf. Aristotle, Politics 1277b20–26 and see Nichols, 82. 

5 

Political restraint so distinguishes Thucydides that Nichols suggests that he is responsible for the 

unexpected moderation Alcibiades shows in restraining the army at Samos from sailing on Athens 

(163).

Book Review: Philosophy Between the Lines 

9 9 

Arthur M. Melzer, Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of 

Esoteric Writings. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014, 464 pp., $45 

(hardcover). 

Thinking Through Philosophy Between the Lines 

Je f f r e y A . B e r n s t e i n 

College of the Holy Cross 

jbernste@holycross.edu 

I. Finding My Way 

Some books secure their import through teaching us things. Other books 

secure their import through bequeathing to us new or long-forgotten 

experiences. Still other books secure their import through reflecting our 

own experiences, conflicts, and desires back to us so that we might better 

understand ourselves. It can be argued that the greatest books perform some 

combination of all three. Arthur Melzer’s monumental Philosophy Between 

the Lines appears to belong to the first and/or second groups but actually 

(albeit discreetly) belongs to the third. This is, perhaps, why I have found it 

so difficult to write anything about it with which I am pleased. 

This in no way means that Melzer’s book fails to teach us, or remind us, 

about the history and practice of esotericism—far from it. In fact, the overwhelming 

success the book has already enjoyed in intellectual circles suggests 

that many feel an enormous gratitude for, or provocation by, Melzer. As I 

compose this, Philosophy Between the Lines has already enjoyed numerous 

reviews from the likes of Allan Arkush, Timothy Burns, Paul Cantor, Damon 

Linker, Harvey Mansfield, David Schaefer, Steven Smith, and Bernard Yack. 1 

1 

See Allan Arkush, “Do You Want to Know a Secret?,” Jewish Review of Books, Summer 2015; Paul 


1 0 0 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 42 / Issue 1 

Additionally Peter Minowitz has produced an elegant guest-edited issue of 

the journal Perspectives on Political Science dedicated to exploring Melzer’s 

book. 2 While the final half has yet to see print (at the writing of this review), 

the thoughtful work of Francis Fukuyama, 3 Norma Thompson, Catherine 

and Michael Zuckert, Michael Frazer, Adrian Blau, Douglas Burnham, Robert 

Howse, Larry Arnhart, Miguel Vatter, Roslyn Weiss, Grant Havers, and 

Peter Augustine Lawler has already appeared in the first half. If this does not 

constitute an Olympic Dream-Team of commentators, surely nothing does. 

It is no exaggeration to say that Philosophy Between the Lines has—within the 

context of humanities and social science texts—achieved a timely recognition 

that only books like Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind and 

(more recently) Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century have. 4 

This is elite company, to be sure. And whether the commentators emphasize 

Melzer’s pedagogy (Cantor, Smith), his comprehensiveness (Schaefer), the 

character of his treatment of esotericism (Mansfield, Lawler, Burnham), the 

manner of his interpretation of historical figures (Burns, Weiss) or of esotericism 

per se (Frazer, Zuckert & Zuckert), his exceptional willingness to engage 

thinkers unsympathetic to his thesis (Thompson), his relation to religious 

esotericism (Vatter, Howse) or religion in general (Havers, Arkush), his relation 

to Strauss (Blau), his claims about the Enlightenment (Arnhart), or the 

effect his thesis has on the question of Leo Strauss’s relation to contemporary 

politics (Fukuyama, Linker, Yack), enough serious individuals have dedicated 

energy to Philosophy Between the Lines that it may be said to already amount 

to a minor classic. 

Cantor, “Philosophy in a Clown Suit,” Weekly Standard, Dec. 22, 2014; Damon Linker, “What If Leo 

Strauss Was Right?,” The Week; Harvey C. Mansfield, “Secret Teaching,” Claremont Review of Books 

15, no. 1, http://www.claremontinstitute.org; David Lewis Schaefer, review of Philosophy Between the 

Lines, Review of Politics 77, no. 2 (2015): 316–18; Steven B. Smith, review of Philosophy Between the 

Lines, Political Theory 43, no. 2 (2015): 271–75; Bernard Yack, review of Philosophy Between the Lines, 

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, Oct. 27, 2014, http://ndpr.nd.edu. Timothy Burns’s review essay is 

forthcoming in Polis 32, no. 2 (2015): 393–411. I thank him for sharing an earlier draft of it with me. 

2 

See Perspectives on Political Science 44, no. 3 (2015): 145–203. The following issue of Perspectives 

will continue this symposium with essays by Gabriel Brahm, Maudemarie Clark, Rogers Smith, and 

Peter Thiel, and a reply by Arthur Melzer. I have not had access to these pieces and, therefore, can only 

mention them here. 

3 

Fukuyama’s contribution was originally published in The American Interest, February 3, 2015. 

4 

See Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy 

and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987); Thomas 

Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard 

University Press, 2014).


1 0 1 

Melzer’s book is a full-scale inquiry into the genesis, causes, and reasons 

for esoteric writing. 5 I agree with the aforementioned commentators that this 

book establishes, beyond any reasonable doubt, the historical existence of 

writing in such a manner that some will understand an author’s true intention 

while others will not. After Melzer, the denial of that history is preposterous. 

I also have little (not to say no) doubt that Melzer is not, himself, practicing 

esotericism in this book. That Melzer declares himself to be “no great lover” 

of esotericism, but rather “seek[s] a restoration not of esoteric writing but of 

esoteric reading” (xii–xiii)—for the purpose of better understanding a crucial 

dimension of the history of philosophy—is not itself a reason to discount the 

suspicion that he practices what he preaches. Yet if Melzer intends to produce 

a defense for acknowledgment of the history of esotericism, it is unclear how 

writing in that manner would bring clarity to his intention. I believe that 

readers should adhere as adamantly as Melzer suggests to Strauss’s dictum 

that “reading between the lines is strictly prohibited in all cases where it 

would be less exact than not doing so.” 6 Nonetheless, questions concerning 

the author’s intent (especially in the context of a book specifically dealing 

with esotericism) remain inevitable. In order both to aid the interested parties 

(who have, presumably, read Melzer’s book three times) and to remain 

faithful to Melzer’s stated claim in the body of my review, I will place my own 

relative suspicions in a footnote. 7 

5 

It is, additionally, supplemented by a 110-page online document of historical testimonia. See “A 

Chronological Compilation of Testimonial Evidence for Esotericism,” http://press.uchicago.edu/sites/ 

melzer/index.html. 

6 

Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 30. 

7 

By “relative suspicion,” I do not mean to indicate that I know what Melzer is up to (if, in fact, he is 

up to anything). Rather, I merely mean to indicate fruitful avenues for this type of research. That said: 

[1] The introduction and chapter 1 begin with the fact that the esoteric tradition has been forgotten 

(1, 11), while chapter 2 begins with bringing our “full attention” to this issue (53). [2] In the final 

four pages of the book—i.e., in discussing esotericism as “preserving the possibility of return” to 

premodern philosophy—Melzer states that “I am less certain that I understand Strauss correctly on 

this point” (363), yet presents it with manifest clarity and passion. [3] Chapter 6 (“Dangerous Truths: 

Protective Esotericism”) and Chapter 7 (“The Educational Benefits of Obscurity: Pedagogical Esotericism”)—the 

central chapters of the central part of the book—form something of a natural pair that 

deal respectively with “the profoundest issues” (161) and “the most genuinely philosophical” kind 

of esotericism (205). [4] Melzer both diagnoses the modern intellectual climate (its hostility to the 

possibility of esotericism) as one plagued by the hyperspecialized economic practice of “division[s] of 

labor” (230), while later holding that “some amount of division of labor is both possible and necessary 

in scholarship” (288) as it pertains to learning to read esoterically. [5] In his discussion of Strauss’s 

project—as it involves esotericism—Melzer, in one fell swoop, notes the importance of “the religious 

question” for Strauss yet decides that “to keep things manageable, I will leave [it] aside” (331). [6] 

Melzer’s treatment of issues concerning (e.g.) the relation between theory and praxis, the “violations” 

(105) that esotericism brings against modern moral ideals, and specific esoteric practices are all presented 

via enumeration (77–78, 90–92, 105–6, 125–203, 211–16, 289, 299, 323–24).


The difficulty resides in my insecurity as to whether I can accurately 

identify what manner of book Melzer’s is. Granted, then, that it is not an 

esoteric work—is it a neutral and objective account of the phenomenon of 

esotericism? But Melzer has already told us that he seeks to revive a kind of 

reading long since forgotten; his narrative is, to that extent, engaged. Is it a 

book of nonesoteric philosophy? If so, then it could only be philosophy in an 

Enlightenment style. But the Enlightenment agenda (or, ideology) is directly 

connected to the decline of esoteric reading; if Melzer were undertaking that 

kind of project, it would surely run counter to the stated aim of his book. Is 

it a history of philosophy, conventionally understood? If so, Melzer is far too 

generous towards his potential dissenters. 8 Melzer refers to his work as “(as it 

were) a Peace Corps field manual for Western scholars that aims to promote 

connection with the communicative customs of our distant past” (52). This 

is certainly a friendly image to use, but it blurs the distinction between the 

practical aims of Peace Corps activity with the theoretical or contemplative 

aims characteristic of philosophical works. Moreover (unless I am mistaken), 

the majority of Melzer’s readers are at least familiar with the idea of esotericism 

if not in agreement with its actuality; Melzer’s text is more akin to an 

apologia (“this is why we study it”) or even a haggadah (“teach your children 

so that they too do not forget”) than a field manual taking us into uncharted 

territory. But this does not bode well for my own thoughts about Melzer’s 

book: if I am unable to approach his nonesoteric work in a straightforward 

manner, there is little chance of my being able to understand any of the works 

about which he so clearly writes. 

In addition to everything else that it encompasses, Philosophy Between 

the Lines amounts to a justification of the work of Leo Strauss. Because the 

most sustained discussion of Strauss’s career occurs in the final chapter 

(“Defending Reason: Esotericism and the Critique of Historicism”), it functions 

as the crescendo of the entire book. I am as little in need of conversion 

about Strauss’s importance as a philosopher as I am about the existence of 

esotericism; it is, rather, the frame of the book that I believe has thrown me 

off. One way to write about Strauss is to show how he uses the history of 

philosophy as a lens or optic through which one might view the fundamental 

distinctions that occur in his thought (e.g., ancients/moderns, Jerusalem/ 

Athens, philosopher/city, philosophy/poetry). Melzer has, in a sense, taken 

the opposite route—Philosophy takes Strauss’s thought, in its rediscovery of 

8 

“But my purpose has not been to establish this interpretation as the demonstratively correct one. 

Let it be incorrect…I have simply sought to provide the reader with a concrete and reasonably plausible 

illustration of what sorts of things are meant by reading between the lines” (66–67).


1 0 3 

esotericism, as the lens or optic through which to view the history of philosophy. 

Both approaches have benefits and drawbacks. For readers unfamiliar 

with Strauss and/or esotericism, Melzer’s book will be illuminating. For 

readers desiring a rigorous and vigorous support of Strauss, his book will be 

unquestionably satisfying. There is no reason in the world why Melzer should 

also need to please readers who are both convinced about the existence of 

esotericism and view it ultimately as a transition point to other horizons. I 

am grateful that Melzer’s work has held an intellectual mirror up to me and 

shown me my reflection. 

In saying this I do not, for one minute, mean to diminish the important 

work that Melzer has accomplished in this book (or the original articles out of 

which this book developed). Its clarity cannot be overstated. That clarity can 

be viewed in the structure of the book, which adopts the tripartite structure of 

historical evidence (part 1), conceptual schematic (part 2), and consequences 

of his argument/research (part 3). Moreover, Melzer is at his best when he 

takes a seemingly basic issue and drops it on his unsuspecting audience like 

a bombshell (in the manner of a Zen koan or, perhaps, Jerry Seinfeld). When 

Melzer muses in chapter 6 (“Dangerous Truths: Protective Esotericism”) that 

“there is no precise science of human irrationality, no accurate sociology of 

false beliefs” (199), the careful (yet unsuspecting) reader is led down a rabbit 

hole of problems both with respect to what such a science could even mean (is 

there a truth of error? can there be an organized, rational body of knowledge 

about the irrational?) and with respect to the humbling insight that perhaps 

the most prevalent aspect of life (irrationality) is not given over to study and 

mastery. Similarly (but no less disconcertingly), in chapter 9 (“A Beginner’s 

Guide to Esoteric Reading”), Melzer attempts to (re-)originate the experience 

of esoteric reading for his readers by comparing it to a “Dear John” break-up 

letter. Just as the reader of such a letter would hang over every word, run 

the gamut of contextualizing procedures in order to figure out just what the 

author intended (e.g., “‘Dearest John.’ You know that she always uses ‘dearest’ 

in letters to you, so the word here means nothing in particular; but her 

‘with love’ ending is the weakest of the three variations that she typically 

uses” [291]), one approaches a philosophical text with the same eros, the same 

dedication, and the same longing to understand and not be left behind. That 

we may be in the position of jilted lovers with respect to great texts of the past 

amounts to a sobering suggestion both as to our abilities as interlocutors and 

as to whether we were even the intended addressee. These are the thoughts 

that leave us awake nights. They are also the thoughts that presumably draw 

us to learn from Philosophy Between the Lines.


II. Melzer’s Project 

Chapters 1–4 (“The Testimonial Evidence for Esotericism,” “Interlude: Two 

Brief Examples,” “The Theoretical Basis of Philosophical Esotericism: The 

‘Problem of Theory and Praxis,’” and “Objections, Resistance and Blindness 

to Esotericism”), comprising the “General Evidence” part of the book, all serve 

to make the case for the mere existence of esotericism as a past practice of 

writing and reading. Strange as it may seem to those of us already convinced, 

Melzer’s modern intellectual not only denies the existence of esotericism, but 

does so explicitly against even the more recent historical testimony to the 

contrary: “With perfect explicitness, all these early modern writers—spanning 

three countries and one hundred fifty years—attribute esotericism to 

virtually all ancient philosophers and philosophic poets and seem to regard 

this fact as well-known” (14). This means that our forgetting of esotericism is 

also a denial of written evidence about esotericism. The solution to this problem, 

Melzer contends, is disarmingly simple: “I would suggest that if readers 

are simply aware of esotericism as a historically common practice, they will 

be open to noticing what otherwise they will unfailingly overlook” (59). This 

awareness, however, comes at a price; it entails a dispassionate recognition 

of the limits of rationality: “I…argue that philosophical esotericism in all its 

forms ultimately grows out of a single, enduring problem of the human condition: 

the fact that we are not pure minds, the essential dualism of ‘theory’ 

and ‘praxis,’ of reason and its nonrational preconditions. In its philosophical 

use, the technique of esotericism—which is dualistic in its effort to send two 

messages at once—is an outgrowth of the essential dualism of human life” 

(70). Differently stated, if philosophy emerges in the city, it always already 

must contend with the opinions, passions, and actions of the nonphilosophical 

majority. The horizon in which reason comes to be is not, itself, rational. 

Seeing that philosophy has a limited capacity to express itself intelligibly in 

the public realm, it must choose carefully whom to speak to and how to do it. 

The philosopher is thus isolated in a double sense: (1) in being able to 

distinguish truth from illusion/deception/opinion, and (2) in not being able 

to openly proclaim this discovery: 

The philosopher is the person who, through a long dialectical journey, 

has come to see through the illusory goods for which others live and 

die. Freed from illusion—and from the distortion of experience that 

illusion produces—he is able, for the first time, to know himself, to 

be himself, and to fully experience his deepest longing, which is to 

comprehend the necessities that structure the universe and human life 

as part of that universe. This is the famous vita contemplativa, an ideal


1 0 5 

of life found, in one form or another, among virtually all classical and 

medieval thinkers and still powerful among many modern thinkers 

as well. (71) 

In “secur[ing] the practical interests of the theoretical life—the safety and the 

propagation of philosophy—in the face of the natural hostility of the nonphilosophical 

community” through the practice of writing between the lines, 

philosophers engage in “philosophical politics” (88). They are (as it were) 

advocates for the Good who acknowledge that the reality of life only allows 

for the Better and Worse: “Philosophical esotericism is a ‘doublespeak’ elicited 

by the doubleness of life itself” (92). 

Chapters 5–8 (“Fear of Persecution: Defensive Esotericism,” “Dangerous 

Truths: Protective Esotericism,” “The Educational Benefits of Obscurity: Pedagogical 

Esotericism,” and “Rationalizing the World: Political Esotericism”) 

comprise the central part of the book (“Four Forms of Esotericism”). Here, 

Melzer provides his readers with in-depth accounts of the different types of 

(which is to say, reasons/necessities for) esotericism. It is fitting that Melzer’s 

discussion begin with defensive esotericism, since everything he has said up 

to this point leads to the belief that fear of persecution is the primary cause 

of writing between the lines; it surely is “the most readily understandable” 

form of esotericism (127). To emphasize his point, Melzer makes an audacious 

claim (that is at once satisfying for the philosophically minded and 

itself worthy of an exoteric formulation): “In the long, turbulent course of 

history, chance has made one group, now another, into a persecuted minority—Christians, 

Jews, African Americans, kulaks, Gypsies, Kurds. But there 

has been one relative constant, with deep roots, it would seem, in the nature 

of things: the persecution of philosophers. To be sure, no one would argue 

that philosophers’ sufferings have been the most severe: they are nothing 

as compared with those of slavery or the Holocaust. But they have arguably 

been the most constant. In the roughly two-thousand-year record of Western 

philosophy prior to, say, 1800, it is difficult to name a single major thinker 

who did not, at some point in his life, experience persecution or at least witness 

it close at hand” (138). The year 1800 is not a completely arbitrary one, 

for Melzer, insofar as the premise of the Enlightenment was “to construct 

a radically new kind of society, one based on reason, in which the tension 

between society and philosophy would be permanently overcome and, with 

it, the deepest cause of persecution” (159). 

To think, however, that the Enlightenment served simply as a way to 

offset or discourage persecution of philosophy would be to already adopt


a post-1800 perspective on esotericism. In this respect, Melzer’s discussion 

of protective esotericism serves as a corrective. For Melzer, protective 

esotericism “raises the profoundest issues and the profoundest resistance” 

(161) because it forces us to face the aforementioned sobering reality about 

the dualistic character of life: we naturally love our opinions and feel acutely 

threatened when our deepest beliefs are challenged—let alone proved insufficient. 

This is as true on the societal level as it is on the individual, and Melzer 

is, thus, certainly not wrong in holding that “the truth can be harmful or 

dangerous” (163). From the standpoint of protective esotericism, truth is 

not dangerous to the philosopher, but rather to the nonphilosopher. Melzer 

expresses one such truth under the heading “the tragic flaw of political life”: 

“Whereas the lowest goods of life—food, shelter, clothing, safety—are selfevident 

to all, the higher goods, precisely in the degree to which they are more 

elevated and more important to us, are less clear and less available to general 

understanding. And this fact makes the higher things not only elusive but 

positively dangerous. For, given this obscurity, the discussion and pursuit of 

all the loftier goods are inherently prone to sectarian conflict, fanaticism, and 

obscurantism, as well as to skepticism, hypocrisy, and corruption” (170–71). 

While we may argue about the correct ways in which the lowest goods should 

become available, there is little disagreement about their need. If, on the 

other hand, one tells one’s children or students that they ought to be listening 

to Beethoven or John Coltrane and not Blink-182, or that they ought to 

be reading Mark Twain and not playing Minecraft, one gets a sense of the 

general problems Melzer is here addressing. Perhaps the best one can do is to 

let them have their fun? 

But who, in their right mind, would take such a dispassionate approach 

towards those about whom we care? It is due to the philosopher’s love of her 

children that she adopts the third of Melzer’s categories: pedagogical esotericism—that 

“most genuinely philosophical” form (205). While it may not be 

the case that the higher goods of philosophical insight are available to everyone 

(or even most), by the same turn, they are not a priori closed off from 

everyone, either. The question of the possibility of philosophy is thus, first 

and foremost, a question of the possibility of education. Strikingly, esotericism 

(in its pedagogical form) maintains that too easy access to philosophical 

insight can harm individuals’ abilities to enact that philosophical insight for 

themselves. For this reason, “the solution…will involve some…effort to give 

away less and to make the reader work more for what he or she is getting” 

(211). Interestingly enough, it is the reliance on books that proves to be the 

culprit against which pedagogical esotericism must respond: “The…danger


1 0 7 

of reading books is that it allows you to skip too many stages, shortcutting 

the proper intellectual development. Especially harmful is that it prevents 

the humble confrontation with your own ignorance. Reading makes you 

prematurely wise. Before you have had a chance to face the questions and 

live with them a while, you have seen the answers” (211). Paradoxically, reading 

renders people passive (213) and entitled. In this way, the very creation 

of the printing press historically contributed to the propagation of the same 

hubris that led the Athenians to put Socrates to death. What, then, is the 

proper relation between author and reader? How might one stem the tide of 

intellectual sluggishness and consumerism? Melzer responds by maintaining 

that any book attempting to counteract these vices takes seriously the following 

problem: “Wisdom cannot be told. The central paradox of philosophical 

pedagogy…is: how can one transmit from the outside what can only grow 

from within? Is there something that one person can do for a person that 

will somehow make him do everything for himself?” (216). Melzer’s answer 

amounts to a written-form of the Socratic method: “[1] do not give away the 

answers…[2] stimulate the student to think for himself—while subtly guiding 

that thinking—by making artful use of questions, hints, and puzzles of 

the right kind…[3] take [one’s] start from where the student is, from what 

he believes right now, and proceed through an internal critique…[and 4] 

proceed in stages” (216–17; numbering added). If premodern philosophical 

texts strike us as foreign, it is because they precisely do not take their bearings 

from models of research characteristic of current academic discourse. 

Instead, they contain (as it were) a living inscription of the process of teaching, 

learning, and discovery. 

The change away from esotericism in modernity, Melzer contends, was 

as gradual as it was radical. The fourth, peculiarly modern, form of esotericism—“political 

esotericism”—arose initially as a way to further the creation 

of a rational society via the reconciling of theory and praxis: 

Ironically, this very project to create a rational society and, correlatively, 

an end to all social hostility toward and censorship of 

philosophy required at first a rigorous new esotericism—one that, 

in general, would aid philosophical writings in their new quest to 

become instruments of political power and, more specifically, would 

help them manage, in a safe and prudent manner, the gradual subversion 

of traditional society and its replacement with a philosophically 

grounded politics. Thus arose…“political esotericism,” which may be 

defined as esotericism in the service of the newly political goal of philosophy: 

to actualize the potential harmony of reason and social life 

through the progressive rationalization of the political world. (236)


It is this modern—and, paradoxically, Enlightenment-oriented—esotericism 

that sought to intervene in practical politics. This, for Melzer, is in keeping 

with the change of orientation away from the autonomy of the contemplative 

life toward the reinstantiation of theory in the service of practice. If the 

purpose of premodern esotericism was to write for the philosophical few, 

the purpose of modern esotericism was to communicate with the many “for 

the purpose of enlightening and transforming the political and religious 

world” (237). This form of esotericism remained a widespread and acknowledged 

phenomenon in the eighteenth century (276). What happened? The 

very practice of esotericism came into conflict with Enlightenment ideals. 

If the project is universal education based on reason, the practice of secrecy 

towards the irrational many can at best be viewed as a necessary evil. As a 

result, “in many thinkers of this period, one detects an ambivalence bordering 

on distaste toward their own esoteric practice. This ambivalence is no 

accident, but results from the fact that political esotericism is in inherent 

tension with itself…a lie designed to end all lying” (281). The ideal of openness 

of the Enlightenment went along with increased vitriol towards any 

practice of secrecy; this, in turn, gave rise to “a hostility to political esotericism 

itself for embracing dissimulation and self-censorship for the sake of 

truthfulness and free speech” (283). Ultimately, the ideals of truthfulness, 

freedom of speech, universal education, and rationality became so prevalent 

that they were simply taken for granted. What started out as a critique 

of prejudice and superstition, on Melzer’s account, became the dominant 

prejudice and superstition. This had the retroactive effect of obscuring the 

reasons for premodern esotericism and, therefore, led to the forgetting of its 

very existence: “The slow march of progress—the improvement of the world 

through the public dissemination of truth—slowly buried the [prior] conflictual 

perspective, until people forgot that it had ever been there. It came 

to seem that classical rationalism was always nothing but a nascent form of 

eighteenth-century rationalism—harmonist, enlightening, and progressive. 

The Enlightenment image of the philosopher—the public-spirited rationalist 

bringing light to the world—came to seem the only one” (284). Expressed 

in historical terms, the point can be stated as follows: premodernity made 

possible the beginnings of modernity; later modernity forgot this beginning 

and, in so doing, forgot what those beginnings were responding to. This 

amounts to a double occlusion: the initial rejection of premodernity (which, 

insofar as it happened between the lines, amounts to an obscuration) and the 

subsequent forgetting of that rejection.


1 0 9 

Chapters 9–10 (“A Beginner’s Guide to Esoteric Reading” and “Defending 

Reason: Esotericism and the Critique of Historicism”), comprising the 

final section of the book (“The Consequences of the Recovery of Esotericism”), 

deal respectively with learning the practice of esoteric reading and 

the place of esotericism in Strauss’s critique of historicism. The former chapter 

is, in large (but not exclusive) measure, a close ministerial presentation of 

Strauss’s essay “Persecution and the Art of Writing.” I will, therefore, forgo an 

extended discussion of it except to say that I found (1) his beginner’s bibliography 

of esoteric interpretation (322–24) to be helpful and (2) his suggestion 

that we ought to understand Strauss’s construal of the “omniscient author” in 

the manner of a “useful heuristic device” (296) to be a genuine contribution 

toward the removal of a stumbling block. What is remarkable about chapter 

10 is that (much in the manner of a text such as the preface to Hegel’s Phenomenology 

of Spirit) it functions as both the first and the last word of the entire 

book. As I mentioned earlier, Strauss’s rediscovery of reading and writing 

“between the lines” is the (initial) lens through which the history of philosophy 

is viewed (i.e., in its esoteric dimension). But insofar as this lens exists as 

it was rediscovered by Strauss, Melzer’s book finds its natural conclusion in 

a discussion of how such a rediscovery operates in Strauss’s own thought. In 

this way—paraphrasing the language of Strauss’s one-time teacher Martin 

Heidegger—Melzer’s book exhibits an evident relation between its beginning 

and its end. 9 

What, on Melzer’s account, is the center of Strauss’s philosophical project? 

It is “first to uncover the fundamental gulf between ancient and modern 

rationalism and, then, to demonstrate that, unlike the latter, the former— 

which is nonhistoricist thought at its peak—was genuinely self-knowing and 

able to give an adequate justification of itself. Both parts of this project rely 

decisively on the rediscovery of esotericism” (349). Whereas the (public) selfunderstanding 

of modern rationalism remains subject to the arational (not to 

say “irrational”) movement of history, premodern rationalism could give an 

adequate justification of itself (as esoteric) precisely insofar as it understood 

itself as persecuted by the nonphilosophical majority. Differently stated, premodern 

rationalism understands the distinction between the theoretical or 

contemplative life of the philosopher, on one hand, and the practical life in the 

city, on the other. There is no conflict between philosophical esotericism and 

public speech because there is no presumed harmony of theory and praxis. 

9 

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, rev. Dennis Schmidt (Albany: State 

University of New York Press, 2010), 7.


This situation becomes exactly reversed in the historicist thought of modernity 

(354). But if modern thought is saddled to a historicist reduction, how 

was Strauss able to find a vantage point from which to step outside it? Melzer 

describes Strauss’s “history of historicism” (358), which began as a critique of 

religion, developed into the Enlightenment ideal of bettering humans’ estate 

(356), and emerged into an “unleashing of theoretical reason on the world 

of practice” which “led to dangerous universalism, political doctrinairism, 

and ideological imperialism” (357) that were subject to the whim of historical 

fashion. The “irony of history” (to use Reinhold Niebuhr’s off-quoted phrase) 

is that what appears rational at one point can transform into its opposite at 

another: “The more that philosophic rationalism, liberated by the Enlightenment, 

moved aggressively into the open, the more it posed dangers to healthy 

moral and political life and thus the more it generated a hostility toward reason. 

This [ultimately] led to…the rise of philosophic antirationalism” (357). By 

the middle of the twentieth century, thinkers began to eschew any conception 

of the good life—even those construed through the crossroads of reason and 

history. Eschewing reason altogether, radical historicism had, at last, reached 

its philosophical apex in relativism. The ideology of progress, therefore, led to 

its own philosophical downfall. 

For Melzer (and Strauss), our ability to see this trajectory stems from the 

fact that historicism “is true of modern thought” (359) but not its premodern 

alternative. In other words, the philosophical apex of modern thought is only 

“relatively” true. Strauss’s insight that modern thought is true relative to its 

own time period amounts to a turning of historicism on its head. This historicizing 

of historicism (i.e., this contextualizing of modern thought) opened 

the space to consider the alternative, which Melzer does: “We have seen that 

the methodology of progress tends to historicize philosophical thinking by 

putting a thinker out of touch with his foundations or presuppositions. But 

the practice of esotericism—considering it now in its pedagogical meaning 

and use—is designed to have the precise opposite effect: when successful, 

it permits, indeed forces, a thinker to examine and fully appropriate his 

foundations” (362). This says nothing other than that the original purpose 

of philosophy is to “see clearly” (362), and only by means of that original 

purpose can one freely take up the challenge of living out one’s foundations 

in self-awareness. Two conditions, however, need to be met in order that 

philosophy as a way of life can occur: (1) that potential philosophers learn 

how to actively philosophize, and (2) that nonphilosophers not hinder, or feel 

hindered by, philosophy. For Melzer, as for Strauss, both conditions depend 

upon the practice of esotericism.


1 1 1 

III. Speaking of Heidegger… 

That Melzer is aware of Strauss’s complex debt to Heidegger, there is little 

doubt: “Strauss’s acknowledged debt to Heidegger means…[that] Strauss 

sees his own path of thought as not simply sui generis but representing the 

self-overcoming of historicism” (344). There are moments, however, where 

Melzer discreetly cautions against any simplistic association of the two: 

“Strauss seems [in “An Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism”] to 

follow Heidegger in maintaining that ‘to be means to be elusive or to be a 

mystery’” (399n55). One might surmise that this merely apparent similarity 

has something to do with Heidegger’s “religious murmurings” (329) 

that Strauss sought to overcome in his history of historicism. Melzer does 

not say; therefore, we do not know for sure. I am struck, however, by the 

deeply Heideggerian resonances that frame and run throughout Melzer’s 

entire narrative. Since I do not believe Melzer to be secretly advocating for 

Heidegger (or anything, for that matter), my point here is not about his intention. 

Conversely, I do not believe that indicating these resonances violates the 

“heuristic omniscient author” directive of Melzer and Strauss. I do find these 

resonances too audible to ignore and will, therefore, draw attention to them. 

Melzer notes (near the beginning of his preface) that “countless books 

have been written celebrating the discovery of some important phenomenon. 

The present work examines the forgetting of one” (xi). This claim is certainly 

true, yet there is (prior to Melzer’s own work) one notable book which explicitly 

raises the theme of forgetting—Being and Time: “This question [i.e., the 

question of being] has today been forgotten” (Being and Time, 1). It is not 

simply that Melzer’s text follows Heidegger in opening its inquiry with this 

theme; forgetting (specifically, the forgetting of esotericism) is, in fact, the 

explicit thread that holds Melzer’s narrative together—this in both its questioning 

as well as its assertive stances: “If a long and now-forgotten tradition 

of philosophical esotericism really did exist in the West, how could we ever 

prove that? How could we even know it?” (11); “over the last two centuries, 

the forgetfulness of esotericism has led modern readers to identify the true 

thought of past writers with the merely exoteric and conventional surface 

of their writings” (355). This forgetting of the question of esotericism is, for 

Melzer and Strauss, coeval with the forgetting of the foundations upon which 

modern thought arose: “having…systematically cut itself off from its own 

roots and foundations, modern ‘progress philosophy’ eventually discovers 

to its surprise that it rests upon choices and presuppositions of which it has 

lost awareness” (366). Differently stated, the forgetting of esotericism goes


hand in hand with the forgetting of the premodern alternative to modern 

philosophy—that is, the forgetting that premodern thought is an alternative. 

If premodern thought is an alternative to modern “progress philosophy” and 

historicism, it renders the latter questionable. If that alternative is occluded, 

however, the questionability itself is hidden as well. Again, this mirrors the 

structure of the problem Heidegger announces in Introduction 1 of Being 

and Time: “not only is the answer to the question of being lacking, but even 

the question itself is obscure and without direction. Thus to retrieve the question 

of being means first of all to work out adequately the formulation of the 

question” (Being and Time, 3). Heidegger’s procedure is mirrored in Melzer’s 

retrieval and formulation of the question of esotericism as an alternative to 

modern philosophy. 

Melzer is quite open and passionate about the dangers of “extreme openness 

and freedom of speech” (201) for modern society: 

When people grow up in an environment where everything is openly 

disputed and questioned, with shocking and contrarian opinions on 

constant display, a common result is that they eventually throw up 

their hands in despair and adopt a “who’s to say” posture toward all 

fundamental questions. …It is not that people today have no real or 

heartfelt beliefs, but under the pressure of an environment of great 

skepticism and dispute, they shelter these beliefs by pushing them 

underground. …Thus, a gulf has opened up between what we think 

and what, deep down, we really believe. Our true beliefs have become 

increasingly unreachable, while our thinking has become increasingly 

insincere. As many observers of our condition have maintained, 

ours is the great “age of inauthenticity.” We no longer reason with our 

whole souls. We don’t connect. (202) 

While many indeed have analyzed the problem of inauthenticity, few have 

done so—within the context of communication—as powerfully as Heidegger 

in his exposition of “idle talk”: “this discoursing…communicates by gossiping 

and passing the word along…a process by which its initial lack of grounds 

to stand on increases to complete groundlessness. And this is not limited to 

vocal gossip, but spreads to what is written, as ‘scribbling’” (Being and Time, 

163). If Melzer (following Strauss) counters inauthentic discourse with esotericism 

(203), this follows Heidegger’s analogous countering of the former 

with “reticence” and “silence”: “Authentic silence is possible only in genuine 

discourse. In order to be silent, Dasein 10 must have something to say, that is, 

10 

In German, “existence.” Heidegger uses it to refer to human beings in a manner that breaks with 

the classical construal of human being as “rational animal.”


1 1 3 

must be in command of an authentic and rich disclosedness of itself. Then 

reticence makes manifest and puts down ‘idle talk.’ As a mode of discourse, 

reticence articulates the intelligibility of Dasein so primordially that it gives 

rise to a genuine possibility for hearing and to a being-with-one-another that 

is transparent” (Being and Time, 159). 

In order to bring potential philosophers back to the point at which they are 

no longer unwittingly beholden to historicism, Melzer’s Strauss undertakes a 

“self-overcoming of historicism.” The Nietzschean phrase “self-overcoming” 

indicates that this interruption occurs from within the very “space” or context 

that is to be interrupted. Strauss accomplishes this by going back through the 

history of philosophy, to its origins in ancient Greece, in order to reoriginate 

or reactivate the fundamental experience of philosophy as a way of life. As 

Richard Velkley has argued, 11 this is precisely what Heidegger refers to as 

“the destruction of the history of ontology.” Melzer is surely correct in stating 

that Strauss ultimately finds classical rationalism to “escape the central Heideggerian 

charge that it dogmatically identifies ‘being’ with ‘intelligible’ or 

‘object’” (351–52). Be that as it may, the procedure Strauss undertakes—and 

the reasons why he undertakes it—are given powerful articulation in Heidegger’s 

oft-quoted passage about “traditonality”: “The tradition that hereby 

gains dominance makes what it ‘transmits’ so little accessible that initially 

and for the most part it covers it over instead. What has been handed down 

is handed over to obviousness; it bars access to those original ‘wellsprings’ 

out of which the traditional categories and concepts were in part genuinely 

drawn. The tradition even makes us forget such a provenance altogether. 

Indeed, it makes us wholly incapable of even understanding that such a 

return is necessary” (Being and Time, 20–21). In Melzer’s words, this return is 

necessary “because philosophy has a natural tendency to decay over time—to 

turn into a tradition, to ‘historicize’—because people tend to accept too passively 

and unquestioningly the conclusions of the great philosophers of the 

past. This tendency is deadly to genuine philosophy, which requires that one 

always think everything through from the beginning and for oneself” (362). 

The self-activation characteristic of philosophy requires a return to the origins 

in order to free oneself from the dependence of tradition. In Heidegger’s 

terms, “The resoluteness in which Dasein comes back to itself discloses the 

actual factical possibilities of authentic existing in terms of the heritage which 

that resoluteness takes over as thrown. Resolute coming back to thrownness 

11 

Richard L. Velkley, Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy: On Original Forgetting (Chicago: 

University of Chicago Press, 2011), 27–79.


involves handing oneself over to traditional possibilities, although not necessarily 

as traditional ones” (Being and Time, 365). It might be argued that the 

formulation “handing oneself over” indicates a historical determinism (or, in 

any case, a fatalism) that Melzer fundamentally wants to oppose. However, 

Heidegger’s point is simply this: our freedom resides in the awareness of our 

philosophical origin and in the possibilities that reexperiencing that origin 

allow us. This is, to my mind, precisely the insight that Melzer (and Strauss) 

have in mind in returning to premodern esotericism. Thus, “handing oneself 

over” to traditional possibilities in a nontraditional way is what Melzer terms 

“thinking for oneself” (215). The truths that one finds in this self-activation 

are not “the expression of historical actuality because such truths could not be 

embodied in any historical actuality” (354). Differently stated: “Higher than 

actuality stands possibility” (Being and Time, 36). Moreover, one does not 

to need to know the German Sorge, Zukunft, and Schicksal to hear the Heideggerian 

resonances in Melzer’s claim that this self-activation amounts to a 

“think[ing] form out of one’s own care, future and fate” (215; my emphasis). 

If I am dangerously close to suggesting that Melzer has given us a Heideggerian 

Strauss, this is neither a criticism nor an insight about Strauss that 

Strauss himself could plausibly deny. Paradoxically, the commentators who 

read Melzer’s book solely as a rescue of Strauss from the charges of political 

influence may have to deal with a Strauss connected with another thinker who 

faced analogous charges (in my own view, more serious and substantial). For 

philosophical readers, however, this ought not be troubling for the very reason 

that Melzer has just stated: thought is not simply reducible to any actual 

historical circumstance. Possibilities lie unexplored because “hiddenness is 

a property of being itself. Nature is esoteric. …A rhetoric of concealment 

would be most useful, perhaps even necessary, to disclose reality as it is in 

its hiddenness” (234). Showing his readers both (1) how Strauss went about 

pursuing the project of thinking for oneself and (2) how readers might take 

up this project for themselves is the supreme merit of Melzer’s work.

Book Review: Three Works on Leo Strauss 

1 1 5 

Jeffrey Bernstein, Leo Strauss: On the Borders of Judaism, Philosophy, and 

History. SUNY Series in the Thought and Legacy of Leo Strauss. New York: 

State University of New York Press, 2015, 228 pp., $85 (hardcover). 

Leo Strauss on Maimonides: The Complete Writings. Edited and with an 

introduction by Kenneth Hart Green. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 

2013, 696 pp., $48 (hardcover). 

Kenneth Hart Green, Leo Strauss and the Rediscovery of Maimonides. Chicago: 

University of Chicago Press, 2013, 207 pp., $36 (hardcover). 

St e v e n F r a n k e l 

Xavier University 

frankel@xavier.edu 

Several years ago in Interpretation, an amicable but fierce debate played out 

between Werner Dannhauser and Hilail Gildin over the alleged atheism of 

Leo Strauss: Dannhauser leveled the charge of atheism, which he claimed that 

Strauss concealed, or at least muted, out of “his reverence for Judaism.” 1 The 

evidence against Strauss is that he was a philosopher and that all philosophers 

are atheists. 2 At the risk of some inconsistency, Dannhauser asked readers 

1 

See Hilail Gildin, “Deja Jew All Over Again: Dannhauser on Leo Strauss and Atheism,” Interpretation 

25, no. 1 (1997): 125–33. Gildin was responding to an essay by Dannhauser, “Athens and 

Jerusalem or Jerusalem and Athens,” in Leo Strauss and Judaism: Jerusalem and Athens Critically 

Revisited, ed. David Novak (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), 155–71. 

2 

Strauss was publicly accused of atheism in Commentary magazine in 1959. His reply, which was 

never sent, was circulated among his students and later published by Kenneth Hart Green. Like 

Socrates, Strauss does not directly refute the charge of atheism; instead, he raises the question of the 

meaning of the charge: “My accuser has not even tried to prove his accusation. If he should be induced 

by this remark to try to prove his accusation, I warn him in advance to keep in mind the difference 

between revealed theology and natural theology or to make himself familiar with it.” See Green, 

Jew and Philosopher: The Return to Maimonides in the Jewish Thought of Leo Strauss (Albany: State 

University of New York Press, 1993), 238. 



for leniency on the grounds that Strauss encouraged his students to take revelation 

more seriously and that as a result, many (including Dannhauser) left 

Strauss’s classroom with a greater appreciation for the Bible. But why would 

a philosopher encourage his students to believe revelation? 

Charging philosophers with impiety and atheism is as old as philosophy 

itself; however, the meaning of impiety changed dramatically in modernity 

as exemplified by the life and work of Spinoza. Here, I refer not to the fact 

that Spinoza himself was accused (and convicted) of not believing in the God 

of the Bible, a charge for which there is compelling evidence. Rather, I mean 

the modern version of the charge that Spinoza leveled against Maimonides 

and medieval philosophy. Spinoza may have been the first philosopher to 

use freely the accusation of impiety to defame others. In chapter 7 of the 

Theologico-Political Treatise, Spinoza takes particular aim at Maimonides. 

He reports that Maimonides “supposes that the Prophets agreed among 

themselves in all things and were the highest caliber Philosophers.” 3 To prove 

this, according to Spinoza, Maimonides developed a simple hermeneutical 

trick, namely, wherever the literal sense of scripture appears to contradict 

reason, the interpreter should abandon the literal meaning in favor of a 

symbolic interpretation. 4 Maimonides realized, according to Spinoza, that 

the nonrational multitude would never willingly submit to the authority of 

philosophy, so he devised this hermeneutical strategy to conceal philosophy 

and present it as theology. Maimonides’s real motive was not piety, nor even 

the preservation of philosophy; rather, he was interested in power. He wished 

to create a “new kind of priest,” who could establish the authoritative reading 

of scripture. Maimonides’s strategy was soon adopted by other unscrupulous 

and ambitious men who turned the interpretation of scripture into a 

violent sectarian affair. Spinoza reports that in his day, “the love of propagating 

divine religion [had] degenerated into sordid greed and ambition, and 

likewise the temple itself into a theater where…orators were heard, none of 

whom was bound by a desire for teaching the populace but for carrying them 

off in admiration for himself.” 5 

Strauss’s verdict on the “case against Spinoza” concedes that Spinoza’s 

critique of scripture, including his attack on Maimonides, is “amazingly 

3 

Benedict Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise, trans. Martin D. Yaffe (Newburyport, MA: Focus, 

2004), 99. 

4 

See ibid., 97. 

5 

Ibid., preface, xix.


1 1 7 

unscrupulous.” 6 By this he means that Spinoza uses scripture to undermine 

the belief in scripture by refuting the Maimonidean claim that it contains 

theoretical wisdom. But why did Spinoza attack Judaism and Maimonides so 

ferociously? Spinoza’s broader strategy was to separate completely philosophy 

and religion, and build a society that allows for freedom in both realms. Forcing 

scripture to abandon its claims to theoretical truth was the price for that 

society, which Spinoza gladly paid in the hope that freedom would create more 

stable and tolerant communities: “the humanitarian end seems to justify every 

means: he plays a most dangerous game; his procedure is as much beyond 

good and evil as his God.” 7 By undermining scripture and promoting freedom, 

Spinoza may have unwittingly undermined the foundations of justice. 

The success of Spinoza’s project can be attributed in large part to the stilted 

account he presents of Athens and Jerusalem: if Athens represents the universally 

true and demonstrable account of the whole and Jerusalem stands for a 

partial, superstitious account based on a particular (and therefore disputed) 

revelation, it is hardly surprising for Spinoza that reason or science prevails. 

With the victory of philosophy, a scholarly consensus emerged on Maimonidean 

political theology as a relic of the past, a misguided attempt to harmonize 

philosophy and religion so that philosophy had the upper hand. By the time 

Strauss wrote his first book on Spinoza’s critique of religion, few scholars— 

with the notable exception of Hermann Cohen—took Maimonides seriously 

as an alternative to Spinoza’s account of the theological-political problem. To 

understand Strauss’s thought, Kenneth Hart Green and Jeffrey Bernstein have 

written detailed accounts of how Strauss managed to recover Maimonides’s 

teaching and reinvigorate the debate between Athens and Jerusalem. 

According to Kenneth Green, Strauss’s Herculean effort to recover 

Maimonides is among the greatest scholarly achievements of the twentieth 

century. He estimates that the recovery of Maimonides is “one of four great 

scholarly rediscoveries of the 20 th century in Jewish Studies, on par with 

[Strauss’s] friend Gershom Scholem’s recovery and presentation of Kabbalah, 

with the rescue, retrieval, and editing of the treasure trove of medieval materials 

stored in the Genizah of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo, and with the 

accidental uncovering…of the ancient Dead Sea Scrolls of the Second Temple–era 

Judea” (Complete Writings, xviii). Green’s scholarship has certainly 

6 

Leo Strauss, “Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion,” in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of 

Modernity, ed. Kenneth Hart Green (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 159. Henceforth 

JPCM. 

7 

Strauss, JPCM, 161.


helped to establish Strauss’s place in Jewish studies, but his latest books have 

achieved something else: by collecting Strauss’s most important writings on 

Maimonides, Green has made it possible for students to follow the development 

of Strauss’s thought and evaluate each of his discoveries. 

Green is well positioned for this project, having spent his career developing 

a rich alternative to Spinoza’s account of the relation between Athens 

and Jerusalem by examining Strauss’s thought. Green’s first book, Jew and 

Philosopher: The Return to Maimonides in the Jewish Thought of Leo Strauss, 

presents Strauss as a “cognitive theist” rather than an atheist. 8 This designation 

preserves Strauss’s openness to the truth of revelation which Spinoza had 

attempted to foreclose in the name of reason. According to Green, Strauss 

learned from Lessing that Spinoza’s rationalism had become dogmatic and 

as such became the very sort of authority that philosophy rebels against. To 

restore the ancient, truer meaning of philosophy, Lessing advised the use of 

revelation against the dogmatism of the Enlightenment. Green shows how 

Strauss, following this strategy, was able to remain loyal to Judaism and pursue 

philosophy. With the addition of these two volumes, Leo Strauss and the 

Rediscovery of Maimonides and Leo Strauss on Maimonides: The Complete 

Writings, Green further demonstrates how Strauss learned from Maimonides 

a strategy for remaining loyal to both cities without compromising the claims 

of either. In other words, Maimonides presented Strauss with a compelling 

alternative to Spinoza’s account of the relation between Jerusalem and Athens. 

Strauss’s recovery of Maimonides, in Green’s presentation, allows simultaneously 

the recovery of ancient philosophy and the restoration of revelation. 

In Leo Strauss on Maimonides: The Complete Writings, Green has collected 

Strauss’s sixteen major essays and lectures on Maimonides, some of which 

have never before appeared in English. As Green admits, however, the title of 

the collection is somewhat misleading since “the aspiration to completeness 

could not be achieved perfectly” (xv). This is because Strauss made so many 

references to Maimonides and medieval philosophy throughout his career 

that any attempt to gather all of them would require several additional volumes. 

Instead, Green has collected the pieces that illustrate Strauss’s gradual 

rediscovery of Maimonides as a thinker of the highest caliber, who surpassed 

in depth and audacity not only Strauss’s contemporaries but also Spinoza. 

To appreciate the value of Green’s collection, consider Strauss’s essay 

“How to Begin to Study The Guide of the Perplexed.” It appeared in 1963 as 

the introductory essay to the monumental English translation of the Guide 

8 

Green, Jew and Philosopher, 26–27, 167n27, 237n1, 239n2.


1 1 9 

by Shlomo Pines. Naturally, most newcomers to Maimonides and Strauss 

would see fit to begin their study with this essay. For one thing, it represents 

Strauss’s most extensive and complete account of how to approach the 

Guide. Strauss seems to suggest as much and begins the essay by presenting 

a detailed outline of the work: “I believe that it will not be amiss if I simply 

present the plan of the Guide as it has become clear to me in the course of 

about twenty-five years of frequently interrupted but never abandoned study” 

(493). Strauss’s title should not be misconstrued. The essay is hardly intended 

for novices who are just beginning their study of medieval philosophy. 

Strauss’s study presumes, like the Guide itself, years of prerequisite study and 

demonstrates how careful students of the Guide speak publicly about the text. 

(Strauss appears to present his findings in an esoteric style: the surface of the 

essay looks chaotic but is undergirded by a hidden structure.) Strauss’s essay 

is so complex—Green describes it as “the most impressive effort ever made 

to map the plan and structure of Maimonides’ great book”—that Green does 

not even attempt to summarize it (63). Rather, he offers twelve clusters of 

questions or perplexities for the reader to ponder. 

If Strauss’s essay represents the peak of his lifelong study of Maimonides, 

Green’s collection helps us approach this summit gradually. Strauss’s essays are 

arranged chronologically so that the reader can see how he managed, step by 

step, to recover Maimonides’s thought. In addition, Green has chosen several 

pieces that Strauss himself did not choose to publish during his lifetime but 

which show the difficulties that he encountered and how he managed to overcome 

them. Among the earliest pieces, Green includes unfinished notes from 

a lecture in Berlin on Hermann Cohen and Maimonides. One reason Strauss 

did not finish these notes is that he was still struggling to understand how 

to read Maimonides. In sharp contrast, the collection also includes Strauss’s 

masterful lecture nearly thirty years later in Chicago, modestly entitled “Introduction 

to Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed.” Here we see Strauss in total 

control of the content and the presentation. In less than thirty years, Strauss 

learned to read the Guide and, as Green observes, “overturn several centuries 

of entrenched conventional scholarly wisdom” in the process (xix). 

Green explains in detail the obstacles with which Strauss contended: 

scholars tended to view Maimonides as a thinker who prepared the way for 

subsequent thinkers, who presumably surpassed him. From their point of 

view, one may admire Maimonides’s contributions to intellectual progress, 

yet also admit that the same progress has rendered his thought obsolete. One 

way that modern thought has surpassed Maimonides is by separating reason


from revelation, a prerequisite for clearing out superstition and promoting 

scientific and moral progress. Our freedom, particularly from superstitions 

such as the belief in revelation, is one hallmark of our progress. The alternative 

to this view was virtually lost until Strauss entertained the possibility 

that medieval and ancient philosophy achieved a “natural perspective…[an] 

enduring perception of human things as they present themselves in their 

unchanged, essential manifestation” (23). 

Nor did Strauss dodge the most compelling parts of Spinoza’s critique, 

such as his account of the prophets as individuals who could rely only on their 

imaginations because of their severely limited knowledge of nature. In his 1935 

essay “Maimonides’ Doctrine of Prophecy and Its Sources,” Strauss coins the 

term “prophetology” to describe the Maimonidean approach to divine law, 

which resembles the Platonic approach to political science whereby prophecy 

is viewed as a branch of it. Whereas Spinoza insists that reason and imagination 

cannot be combined in a single human being, Maimonides argues that 

the best lawgiver combines both and is the most perfect human being. The 

prophet, like the Platonic philosopher king, is the most perfect individual and 

as such most qualified to establish the best society. The divine law combines 

religion and politics to order society in the most rational way. Nor could the 

best society be ordered in any other way since rationality has limited authority 

among the nonrational individuals who are always the majority. 

To describe the divine law as the best law means that its rationality is 

balanced by its ability to appeal imaginatively to nonrational individuals. 

This is what Green describes as a “unique balance” between reason and revelation; 

the tension between them is managed in such a way as to maintain 

the integrity of both (26). Maimonides “first accepts and obeys the Law,” by 

whose authority he finds justification for a “life devoted to reason” (27). In 

Philosophy and Law (1935), Strauss argues that modern political thought had 

discredited this delicate balance such that the only compelling alternatives 

appear to be “orthodoxy or atheism.” Neither alternative appealed to Strauss; 

instead he sought to rediscover another possibility that could be embraced 

“by rational people…and not merely as an extravagant gesture or act of will, 

bespeaking despair, muddle-headedness, distress, or loss of nerve” (30). Such 

a possibility entails an approach to scripture and Law that does not cut them 

off from reason. 

Following the thought of Maimonides led Strauss to another unexpected 

discovery. In contrast to the scholarly consensus that insisted on seeing 

Maimonides as a disciple of Aristotle, Strauss discovered from Farabi that


1 2 1 

Maimonides was instead closer to Plato: “Plato had already discovered the 

principles that were vital to advance the freedom of philosophic thinking in its 

theological-political context” (32). In “The Place of the Doctrine of Providence 

according to Maimonides” (1937), Strauss shows how Maimonides adapts the 

Platonic distinction between the few and the many to his interpretation of 

the Law. His dual teaching of providence includes a general sense of providence 

for those who follow the Law and contribute to the collective order, and 

particular providence for those who are intellectually excellent. Intellectual 

virtue remains preeminent, but it does not undermine moral virtue. 

As Strauss became more attentive to the demands of Platonic philosophy, 

his care in reading Maimonides became even more rigorous. Reviewing a 

new translation of Maimonides’s Mishneh Torah in 1939, Strauss complains 

that the translator has not paid enough attention to the precision of the author 

in numbering paragraphs, translating key terms consistently, and in general 

assuming that Maimonides’s writing was anything but as “careful, precise, 

artful, deliberate, and thoughtful as it is possible for a human author to 

achieve” (43). Within two years, Strauss would publish his discovery, in “The 

Literary Character of the Guide of the Perplexed” (1941), that the literary style 

of the Guide was the key to unraveling its political teaching. Maimonides had 

openly admitted to choosing every word of the Guide deliberately and carefully. 

Even where he appeared to contradict himself, he had assured readers, 

this too was deliberate. The fact that the surface of the text appears disorganized 

or haphazard should not discourage us from observing the profound 

depths of the book. In other words, Maimonides’s esotericism is hidden in 

plain sight. Why then had it been so completely neglected by modern scholarship? 

The assumptions that inform that scholarship have an important 

source in Spinoza’s hermeneutics, particularly chapter 7 of the Treatise, which 

explains how to read the Bible. According to Spinoza, the chaotic surface of 

the biblical text does not conceal any profound depth. Rather, the surface is 

exactly what it appears to be, that is, a hastily compiled amalgam of sources: 

“faulty, truncated, adulterated, not consistent with itself, [and] we have only 

fragments of it.” 9 Despite subsequent efforts to harmonize the text, there is 

little point in searching for wisdom beyond the surface. Modern scholars are 

trained to confirm that the Bible mostly reflects the cultural background and 

prejudices of its authors, as well as a simple teaching of caritas. Spinoza has 

trained us moderns to stop our interpretation at the literal surface of the text. 

9 

Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise, 14.


Maimonides’s account invites us to consider that, however rare it may be, 

wisdom is a permanent, trans-historical possibility, and that such wisdom is 

contained in revelation, including knowledge of the best human life and the 

best form of political organization. Nor is scripture naive about the threats 

to that life, particularly that posed by superstition. It offers the most powerful 

program ever conceived to limit superstitious ignorance and enlighten 

humanity. Another hallmark of the wisdom of scripture is its recognition of 

the limits of enlightenment and the permanent divide between the few and the 

many. According to Maimonides, this wisdom is embodied in a literary style 

that simultaneously addresses the different desires and needs of each group. 

The apparent chaos on the surface of the Bible is actually a brilliant strategy 

to address individuals of varying rationality. Such a style can be achieved 

only by the most perfect individuals, the prophets, who miraculously achieve 

perfection of the intellect and imagination— the very possibility that Spinoza 

denies at the beginning of the Treatise. 

In addition, the literary style implies a profound concern for the well-being 

and the enlightenment of everyone, regardless of one’s level of rationality. The 

lexicographic chapters at the beginning of the Guide indicate a basic level of 

knowledge that everyone is obliged to accept lest he transgress the law by 

committing idolatry. The public dimension of Maimonides’s teaching gives 

way to the secret teachings of the Torah, but these secrets are concealed with 

extraordinary care (see Green’s catalog of these means at Complete Writings, 

47). Those who take care to penetrate the secret teaching are presumably 

obliged by their wisdom above all not to divulge things that may undermine 

the well-being of the others (or the stability of the society). The fact that teachings 

are allegedly hidden, and that those who discover them may not divulge 

their discoveries, leads to endless speculation about the true meaning of the 

Torah. Can we ever be certain that Maimonides means what he says? As in 

a Platonic dialogue, the literary style emphasizes questions and the quest for 

certainty—even more than answers. This helps explain why it is so difficult to 

get to the bottom of Maimonides’s project, even with Strauss’s analysis. 

Strauss had misgivings about the choice between atheism and orthodoxy 

that he faced as “a young Jew born and raised in Germany.” 10 Both choices 

demanded commitments that Strauss was unwilling to make. The atheism 

of his peers was based not on love of truth, but on a love of cruelty turned 

inward, that is, a willingness to suffer as a sign of rectitude. Such a commitment 

could have been justified if Spinoza had been successful in giving 

10 

Strauss, JPCM, 137.


1 2 3 

a full and rational explanation of the whole. Since he was not, it was a mere 

act of faith not necessarily superior to religion. To make matters worse, this 

version of atheism was not moderated by reason, and tended to gravitate 

toward extreme political teachings. On the other hand, Spinoza’s success in 

criticizing Maimonides appeared to render the choice for orthodoxy even less 

palatable, since it rested on belief in revelation that appeared to be no more 

than an irrational and fantastic dream. Strauss set out to restore both Jerusalem 

and Athens, as Green persuasively argues, with Maimonides as his guide. 

This explains why, as we saw above, Strauss’s students left his courses 

with renewed respect for both reason and revelation. But Green’s account, 

while persuasive, also raises some troubling questions. The defense of Maimonides 

involves showing the possibility, contra Spinoza, that scripture 

contains theoretical wisdom. But apart from his posthumously published 

lecture “On the Interpretation of Genesis,” Strauss makes relatively little 

effort to do so. 11 In addition, Green’s collection reveals that Strauss did most 

of his work on Maimonides in the thirties. After 1941, there are relatively 

few studies devoted exclusively to Maimonides. There is, to be sure, the 

important effort Strauss made to have the Guide translated into English in 

1963—an effort that leaves no doubt about his reverence for Maimonides. 

But Strauss’s prodigious scholarly output is primarily devoted to Athens. One 

might wonder whether Strauss turned from Maimonides to Plato as a result 

of his “rediscovery” of Maimonides. Or, as Spinoza suggests, whether respect 

for Jerusalem merely conceals an attempt to establish the authority of Athens. 

Green insists otherwise: 

Strauss expresses his conviction that, however much Maimonides 

made use of Greek philosophy, what he presents as his definitive 

teaching is affirmatively Jewish. This is not merely Greek philosophy 

with a Jewish veneer, but is an attempt to wrestle with the challenge of 

ancient Greek thought, and with what the best Greek thinkers taught 

about God, man, and the world in order to, if possible, make it consistent 

with Jewish teachings. (61) 

Green’s two volumes establish the importance of Strauss’s rediscovery of 

Maimonides and, more generally, the need to study medieval rationalism 

in order to grasp the limits of modern rationalism. At the same time, and 

11 

Leo Strauss, “On the Interpretation of Genesis,” in JPCM, 359–76. Also see Leo Strauss, “Jerusalem 

and Athens: Some Preliminary Reflections,” in JPCM, 377–405.


to Green’s great credit, his collection and commentary do not suppress the 

central questions about the relation of Athens and Jerusalem. 12 

Indeed, Green has pursued theoretical alternatives openly and vigorously 

as the director of the SUNY Press series The Thought and Legacy 

of Leo Strauss, inviting a range of serious contributions from scholars of 

Strauss’s thought. The most recent addition to this series is Jeffrey Bernstein’s 

Leo Strauss: On the Borders of Judaism, Philosophy, and History. Like Green, 

Bernstein affirms the centrality of Maimonides for understanding Strauss 

(51, 162–63). He also argues that Maimonides made it possible for Strauss 

to recover both Jerusalem and Athens and this recovery makes him a most 

original and important critic of modern Jewish thought (see 34). In addition, 

Bernstein’s account supplements and extends Green’s analysis. For example, 

in an original and penetrating reading of What Is Political Philosophy?, Bernstein 

shows that Strauss deliberately avoided mentioning Maimonides during 

his lectures at the Hebrew University in 1953 in order not to upset his audience 

(130). This helps demonstrate that Maimonides plays a central role in 

grasping the meaning of Strauss’s mature thought, even when he is hidden 

from view (127). 

But Bernstein’s account of Maimonides and his relation to Spinoza 

diverges from Green’s in interesting ways. Taking as his starting point 

Strauss’s correspondence in the thirties, Bernstein argues that Maimonides 

represents for Strauss a philosopher “who is theoretically uncompromising 

in his advocacy of philosophy and who also wrote exoterically in order not 

to upset the community in which he lived” (xxvii). Maimonides recovered 

Platonic political philosophy and moved into Athens, where Strauss found 

him and also took up residence (47–48): Maimonides “was a citizen of Athens 

donning the outfit of Jerusalem” (131). Strauss too, following Machiavelli, 

conceals his blasphemy and thereby “compels the reader to think the blas- 

12 

Green has rightly pointed out in a recent interview that it would be foolish to interrogate Strauss to 

discover his view of Jerusalem: “If some people might be inclined to set up a Jewish inquisition, and 

suspect every Jewish thinker or even every Jewish person, and to examine or interrogate them for how 

much, or how precisely, they believed in every article of the faith as defined by Maimonides, I can’t 

vouch for what the exact result would have been in the case of Leo Strauss. But I also don’t think that 

this is a very Jewish thing to do. Rather, we should judge Strauss by his actions; and in terms of these, 

we would see that he was a profoundly loyal Jew during his entire life” (https://kavvanah.wordpress. 

com/2013/07/18/why-maimonides-matters-kenneth-hart-green-part-i/). But, while relentless inquiry 

and theoretical boldness are unseemly for a citizen of Jerusalem, do such traits not characterize (leaving 

aside the violence) the spirit of inquiry in Athens?


1 2 5 

phemy by himself and thus to become [his] accomplice.” 13 Bernstein makes 

an even bolder argument in chapter 5, where he suggests that according to 

Strauss, both Spinoza and Maimonides shared the same “compulsion” for the 

truth, “be it construed as Platonic eros…or Spinozan conatus” (150). In this 

reading of Persecution and the Art of Writing, the “differences between the 

two…appear to be historical rather than philosophical. Differently stated, the 

divergence between the two thinkers concerns their modes of presentation 

more than the content of their thought” (153). 

As for the differences between Spinoza and Maimonides, Bernstein 

argues that they are more apparent than real. Spinoza’s radical critique of 

religion, for example, was not original; rather it had been rediscovered by 

Machiavelli who in turn had learned it from medieval and pagan philosophy 

(127). In fact, it had been well known to Maimonides, who chose to 

conceal it from all except his more careful readers. Strauss says that Maimonides 

“brought the greatest sacrifice” by defending the Torah against the 

philosophers. Bernstein interprets this sacrifice to be Maimonides’s political 

and religious accommodation of his philosophic thought to the Jewish 

people, even though he affirmed the superiority of intellectual to moral virtue 

(129–32). From this point of view, the conflict between Jerusalem and 

Athens appears to be a version of the tension between the imagination and 

reason, which Spinoza describes as the problem of superstition. The fact that 

each presents a different solution to the conflict represents the historical or 

accidental circumstances in which each thinker found himself: “In another 

age, or even in another country, Spinoza would have been compelled by his 

principle of caution to make entirely different proposals for the protection of 

philosophy, without changing in the least his philosophical thought.” 14 

Had Bernstein merely portrayed Strauss as an advocate of Athens, his 

account would have been nearly identical to Heinrich Meier’s presentation 

of Strauss “as a political philosopher who never wavers from his attempts to 

disprove revelation” (137). 15 Instead, Bernstein devotes much of his analysis 

13 

This is Strauss’s description of Machiavelli, but Bernstein uses it to describe Strauss’s treatment of 

Maimonides (see 127–28). 

14 

Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 192, 

quoted in Bernstein, 153. 

15 

In chapter 5, Bernstein distinguishes his position from Meier’s presentation of Strauss as a modern 

atheist political philosopher in Leo Strauss and the Theological-Political Problem (Cambridge: 

Cambridge University Press, 2006). According to Bernstein, Meier’s presentation claims that Strauss 

does not take revelation seriously as an alternative to philosophy, but rather “holds that philosophy 

needs the existence of revelation only insofar as that existence allows philosophers to better see the


to Strauss’s preoccupation with Judaism, particularly his efforts to rescue 

modern Jewish thought from its devotion to historicism and the belief in 

progress. One of the most fascinating sections of Bernstein’s argument is 

his chapter “Strauss’s Maimonides,” which shows both Strauss’s debt to his 

fellow scholars of Jewish thought and his radical rejection of their work. 

Bernstein also shows how Strauss’s stay at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem 

in 1954–55 culminated in his attempt to address the meaning of Zionism 

without undermining the modern Jewish state. In short, according to Bernstein, 

Strauss may not have been a believer, but he was certainly devoted to 

the study of Jewish thought (83, 23, 34). This paradox, that Strauss remained 

devoted to Judaism without being a believer, rests at the heart of Bernstein’s 

inquiry. How did Strauss manage to reconcile the love of one’s own with the 

love of the good? 

Fittingly, Bernstein crafts his answer from Strauss’s own remarks explaining 

that the prophets and Socrates do not live in the center of the city, but at 

the periphery: “The man who loves perfection and justice must leave the cities 

inhabited exclusively by the wicked, to search for a city inhabited by good 

men, and he must prefer, if he does not know of such a city or if he is prevented 

from bringing one about, wandering in the desert or in caverns to the 

association with evil men.” 16 According to Bernstein, Strauss chose to live “on 

the border” so that he could seek the good in full view of other alternatives. 

Some borders are more lasting and comprehensive than others. National borders, 

for example, are not as comprehensive as the border between reason and 

revelation, a border upon which the West itself was founded. Even though 

Strauss settled in Athens, he lived on the border where he had a full view of 

Jerusalem, where the attraction of revelation was perpetually in view. As a 

result, Strauss was able to resist dogmatism and sectarianism; in fact, this 

appears to be the precondition for philosophy, one shared by Maimonides, 

Spinoza, and Strauss. 

To live on the border, for Bernstein, means to take seriously the tension 

between reason and revelation, and the centrality of this tension is easy to 

identify in the work of Maimonides and Strauss. The case of Spinoza is more 

challenging because the “chief purpose” of his Theologico-Political Treatise is 

alternative to the philosophical way of life; in seeing this alternative, philosophers better understand 

their own way of life” (137). 

16 

Leo Strauss, “Some Remarks on the Political Science of Maimonides and Farabi,” in Complete Writings, 

ed. Green, 305; quoted in Bernstein, 13 (cf. 85).


1 2 7 

to redraw the borders. 17 On this new map, revelation surrenders to reason all 

claims to the truth. Spinoza’s residence may still be located on the outskirts, 

but the map seems to have changed dramatically. Furthermore, according 

to Strauss, Spinoza lived in temporary housing while he built a new city and 

a new church. The foundation for this city was a new conception of God. 

Spinoza “showed the way toward a new religion or religiousness which was 

to inspire a wholly new kind of society, a new kind of Church. He became 

the sole father of that new Church which was to be universal in fact.” 18 Bernstein 

admits that it appears “Spinoza’s thought is the precise rejection of 

Maimonides’s thought,” but in fact remains closely attached to Maimonidean 

thought in maintaining the superiority of the theoretical life over the 

practical life (136). This philosopher does not move his residence, even if his 

neighbors—the particular form of superstition—move. Spinoza’s claim that 

Maimonides wished to create “a new form of ecclesiastical authority,” namely 

reason, turns out to apply equally well to Spinoza himself. 

One might wonder whether Spinoza, in redrawing the borders and 

founding a new church, has managed to resist the temptation to dogma or, 

in other words, whether the revolt of philosophy initiated by Machiavelli 

remains located in Athens. Such questions and many others raised in these 

stimulating and important volumes are well worth pondering as we decide, 

as Strauss urges us to do, which city to live in: “No one can be both a philosopher 

and a theologian, or, for that matter, some possibility which transcends 

the conflict between philosophy and theology, or pretends to be a synthesis 

of both. But every one of us can be and ought to be either one or the other, 

the philosopher open to the challenge of theology, or the theologian open to 

the challenge of philosophy.” 19 Bernstein and Green have done a great service 

for students seeking residence in either Jerusalem or Athens by clarifying the 

fundamental issues that separate them. 

17 

Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise, chap. 14. 

18 

Strauss, JPCM, 156. 

19 

Strauss, JPCM, 116.

1 2 8 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 42 / Issue 1

Book Review: Redeeming the Prince 

1 2 9 

Maurizio Viroli, Redeeming the Prince: The Meaning of Machiavelli’s Masterpiece. 

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015, 208 pp., $26.95 (cloth), 

$19.95 (paper). 

G r e g ory A . McBr ay e r 

Morehead State University 

g.mcbrayer@moreheadstate.edu 

In honor of the 500th anniversary of the composition of Machiavelli’s 

Prince, and at the prompting of Robert Tempio, senior editor at Princeton 

University Press, Maurizio Viroli wrote an essay to elucidate the meaning of 

Machiavelli’s most famous work. Viroli has since expanded that essay into 

a commendable book. His thesis regarding the meaning of The Prince can 

be stated concisely: Machiavelli’s lifelong dominant passion was to see Italy 

redeemed, and he accordingly composed The Prince to “design and invoke a 

redeeming prince. …The Prince’s most important political message is about 

the redemption of Italy” (45). Machiavelli aimed, above all, to inspire Italy’s 

redeemer. Viroli offers a persuasive and compelling thesis, and his book, 

worthy reading for anyone interested in Machiavelli’s political thought, 

encourages reflection on the intention of The Prince. 

Viroli, one of world’s most distinguished Machiavelli scholars, is currently 

professor emeritus of politics at Princeton University; professor of 

government at the University of Texas, Austin; and professor of political communication 

at the University of Italian Switzerland, Lugano. He has written 

many books on Machiavelli, both in English and in his native Italian. Those 

written in Italian have been translated into English, and vice versa, so his 

books on Machiavelli are available to scholars in both languages. The English 

titles of his works include Machiavelli (Oxford University Press, 1998), Niccolò’s 

Smile: A Biography of Machiavelli (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2000), How to 



Read Machiavelli (Granta, 2009), and Machiavelli’s God (Princeton University 

Press, 2010). To this list he now adds the present work. 

Redeeming the Prince consists of four relatively short chapters, as well as a 

list of figures, a preface, notes, and an index. The index includes a list of proper 

names, books cited, and a handful of topics. The book contains thirteen figures 

plus the frontispiece from the title page of Machiavelli’s Il Principe. Interspersed 

throughout the book one finds photographs of, for example, Michelangelo’s 

sculpture Moses, Giorgio Vasari’s Pope Leo X’s Procession through Florence, 

and the English School engraving Martyrdom of Savonarola. These images 

complement the text nicely, and offer the reader a pleasing opportunity to 

contemplate the people, events, and places to which the infamous Florentine 

refers and to reflect on their significance in his thought. 

In his introduction, Viroli situates his approach to Machiavelli among 

the current dominant lines of interpretation. Machiavelli is not, in his view, 

a teacher of evil, a republican, or an inaugurator of modern political realism 

and modern political science. Nor is he the man who divorced politics from 

ethics. For Viroli, the primary purpose of The Prince is to “impel action,” and 

he arrives at this conclusion, in large part, on the basis of his interpretation of 

the final chapter of the book. Viroli argues that that chapter, “Exhortation to 

Seize Italy and to Free Her from the Barbarians,” is the key to unlocking the 

meaning of The Prince, and the rest of the work can and should be interpreted 

in its light. Much depends, then, on Viroli’s interpretation of the final chapter. 

Viroli discusses the “Exhortation” throughout his book, drawing upon it 

frequently and incorporating it into his analysis of other parts of The Prince. 

Since, however, so much of his analysis is bound up with this chapter, a more 

focused commentary on it would have strengthened his argument in the eyes 

of his detractors. The book is nevertheless impressive and largely persuasive: 

Viroli moves across The Prince freely and with confidence, demonstrating a 

clear command of the work. Moreover, Machiavelli’s entire corpus is at the 

tips of his fingers; he regularly draws from Machiavelli’s best-known works 

such as the Discourses and Florentine Histories, but also from his lesserknown 

works and private correspondence. The references to Machiavelli’s 

private letters add context and generally support Viroli’s interpretation of The 

Prince. They are also delightful treats for anyone interested in Machiavelli. 

At times, however, Viroli’s method leads him to be somewhat loose with 

the text. For example, in a discussion of the highest type of prince, the armed 

prophet who has acquired an entirely new principality by his own arms and


1 3 1 

virtue, Viroli has Machiavelli say that Cyrus, Romulus, and Theseus “were 

not that different” from Moses (23, emphasis mine), implying there was still 

a difference. But whether there is a difference makes all the difference in the 

world: did Moses introduce a new order on his own or did he receive his 

orders from God? Machiavelli says that if the actions and orders of Cyrus, 

Romulus, and Theseus are considered, they will appear “no different” from 

those of Moses. (The translation Viroli uses says, “They will not appear different” 

[331]. The original runs, “parranno non discrepanti da quelli di Moisè.”) 

We thus risk missing Machiavelli’s suggestion that Moses, who appears to 

have “had so great a teacher,” in fact did not. Moses, in Machiavelli’s estimation, 

like the three other great princes he mentions, acquired his principality 

by his own arms and virtue. 

Direct references to The Prince are concentrated in the first chapter, “The 

Prince as Redeemer.” This chapter contains the core of Viroli’s argument. 

Here he shows, from the text of The Prince but also from other sources, 

that Machiavelli sought to bring about a redeemer. Machiavelli is an Italian 

patriot who sought the liberation of his fatherland. While Viroli refers to the 

“Exhortation” in this chapter, however, he draws primarily, and with good 

reason, from chapter 6 of The Prince. Indeed, the thrust of Viroli’s argument 

in chapter 1 convincingly shows that Machiavelli sought to effect political 

change at the highest level; Machiavelli has a redeemer in mind greater than 

even the greatest political actors of his own time, like Ferdinand of Aragon. 

He had in mind men who created new and good political orders like Moses, 

Cyrus, Romulus, and Theseus. 

The notion of a redeemer, a singular human being who can liberate a 

nation, can strike one as extraordinarily fantastic, so Viroli devotes the second 

chapter to showing that his thesis regarding redemption is not at odds with 

Machiavelli’s much-celebrated realism. Machiavelli, he argues, is a realist with 

imagination, by which he means Machiavelli can conceive of a political world 

radically different from the one that currently exists but remains within the 

realm of possibility. Based on his “knowledge of history and the analysis of 

the human passions,” Machiavelli is aware of possibilities that appear to be 

impossible in present circumstances. Armed with the proper military power, 

and powerful ideas, political reality can be radically changed. 

While arms and the military are essential to changing the political reality, 

Viroli focuses in the third chapter on the power of Machiavelli’s ideas and 

words to aid in this endeavor. Machiavelli, who had neither political power nor 

an army, shaped souls with his rhetoric. Viroli adumbrates the principles of


classical rhetoric and argues persuasively that Machiavelli employed classical 

rhetorical devices—including similes, images, irony, and metaphors—masterfully 

in his Prince. Fortune, as is well known, is metaphorically described 

as a woman, and the lion and the fox are images of force and deceit. While 

Viroli discusses the importance of rhetoric for interpreting the final chapter 

of The Prince, exploring the use of the whole range of rhetorical devices 

within it, and convincingly highlights its extraordinarily rhetorical character, 

the arrangement of the book as a whole, and in particular the placement 

of the final chapter, is also essential to understanding it. Since arrangement of 

the argument was an important part of classical rhetoric, our understanding 

The Prince would benefit from examining the principle of arrangement in 

classical rhetoric. 

In the fourth and final chapter, Viroli aims to show that The Prince indeed 

had the impact that he claims Machiavelli intended. Viroli does so in three 

ways: First, he offers examples of other philosophers who turned to Machiavelli, 

retrieved the notion of a redeemer from him, and followed his lead in 

seeking to inspire redemptive political action. Here he offers the examples 

of Hegel and Fichte in Germany and Gramsci in Italy. Next, he points to 

political actors who were redeemers in the Machiavellian mold, leaders such 

as Oliver Cromwell, George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Otto von 

Bismarck. Finally, in the longest part of the chapter, he reviews the work of 

other scholars, from the nineteenth century onward, who view Machiavelli as 

a theorist of political emancipation, including Francesco de Sanctis, Pasquale 

Villari, and Oreste Tommasini, among others. The chapter—and thus the 

book—ends with a discussion of twentieth-century literary historian Luigi 

Russo. While Viroli marshals evidence in this chapter to show that his thesis 

has been borne out in fact, and thus provides a kind of conclusion, readers 

might have benefited from a more typical final chapter in which Viroli summarized 

his argument and presented his conclusions in concise fashion. 

In any event, Viroli persuasively makes the case that Machiavelli aimed 

to effect great political change with his “small volume.” By way of conclusion, 

however, let me suggest that Machiavelli’s ambitions may have been 

even grander than Viroli here allows. First, Machiavelli elsewhere indicates 

that his interests in effecting political change were not limited to Italy. In his 

Discourses, Machiavelli says that he sought to find new modes and orders 

because he has always had a desire for those things that he believes will be 

to the common benefit of everyone (Discourses I, Preface). Next, regarding 

who Machiavelli’s redeemer might be, consider the following. In one of the


1 3 3 

two epigraphs to his book, Viroli quotes from a letter by Filippo Casavecchia 

to Machiavelli from June of 1509: “Every day I discover you to be a greater 

prophet than the Hebrews or any other nation ever had.” Later in his book, 

Viroli persuasively argues that the final chapters of The Prince are written in 

a prophetic spirit and correctly draws the conclusion that Machiavelli presents 

himself as a prophet, one comparable in greatness to Moses. By casting 

himself as a prophet akin to Moses, Machiavelli leads the reader to consider 

whether Machiavelli himself is in the same class as those four most excellent 

princes of chapter 6: Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, or Theseus. As he says in chapter 

15, he “departs from the orders of others”—a convoluted way of saying that he 

seeks to introduce new orders. Machiavelli’s Prince does not aim to inspire a 

redeemer of the highest order; rather, that redeemer is Machiavelli himself.


Book Review: Leo Strauss’s Defense of the Philosophic Life 

1 3 5 

Rafael Major, ed., Leo Strauss’s Defense of the Philosophic Life: Reading “What 

Is Political Philosophy?” Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013, 232 pp., 

$30 (paperback). 

S u s a n McWi l l i a m s 

Pomona College 

susan.mcwilliams@pomona.edu 

Leo Strauss’s Defense of the Philosophic Life is a readerly book. I mean that in 

several ways. First, it is a book about how to read the writings of Leo Strauss, 

particularly his signature What Is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies. 

Second, it is a book about how Strauss himself read—about Strauss as a 

reader of political philosophy and its history. Third, it is a book that is quite 

easy to read, especially given its often complex subject matter. Finally, it is a 

book that leaves you wanting to pick up other books and read more. 

There has been plenty written about Leo Strauss, to be sure. But what this 

volume quietly sets into relief is how much of that writing has been either 

distracted by brash academic theatricality or directed to exploring intricate, 

intramural differences of scholarly interpretation. Against books about 

Strauss that are for either scandalmongers or insiders, here, thank goodness, 

is a book for people who merely want to be his readers. It may be hard to 

believe, but as editor Rafael Major tells us on the first page, this “is the first 

systematic textual study that seeks to understand a single work of Strauss on 

its own terms” (1). 

That’s not to say that this volume ignores the hullabaloos that surround 

Strauss’s name. Major explains that he chose to focus on What Is Political 

Philosophy? not just because it ranges widely across all the major themes 

of Strauss’s work but also because it was published before Strauss became a 

divisive figure among political scientists. (What Is Political Philosophy? was 



published in 1959; Major dates Strauss’s first foray into disciplinary controversy 

to 1962, when Strauss published a forceful attack on behavioral political 

science that helped to catalyze a virulent debate within the profession.) In 

telling that story, Major deftly encourages us to read What Is Political Philosophy? 

with the new eyes that come from trying to inhabit an older 

perspective—itself, as this volume reminds us, a quintessentially Straussian 

move. One takes the past seriously in part to gain a broader perspective on 

the present; one reads a precontroversial Strauss seriously in part to gain a 

broader perspective on contemporary controversies around him. Given the 

framework of Major’s introduction, these essays are able to illuminate certain 

debates about Strauss and Straussianism without belaboring or even drawing 

attention to them. The volume’s focus on reading What Is Political Philosophy? 

on its own terms thus has the effect, almost paradoxically, of making a 

stronger contribution to present-day conversations about Strauss than most 

attempts that have been made to engage those conversations directly. 

Each of the ten chapters of Leo Strauss’s Defense of the Philosophic Life 

speaks to the corresponding chapter in What Is Political Philosophy?, and each 

chapter is written by a different scholar. This chapter-by-chapter approach is 

truly wonderful. It encourages you to read both books together. And it makes 

clear that the treatment of What Is Political Philosophy? in this edited volume 

is mostly comprehensive. (I say “mostly” because the one lamentable omission 

in Leo Strauss’s Defense of the Philosophic Life lies in its neglect of the 

“Sixteen Appraisals”—book reviews, largely—that make up the last section of 

What Is Political Philosophy? Given that Strauss presumably chose to include 

those in his book with some reason and more than some care, it seems curious 

that their existence merits only a couple of passing remarks in what is 

otherwise a book that covers its subject with such care. Why did Strauss 

include those reviews, rather than others he could have chosen? How do they 

echo, engage, or depart from the themes of the book’s formal chapters? What 

do those “appraisals” teach us about how to appraise Strauss’s own aims and 

methods? I wish this volume suggested some answers to those questions.) 

The structure of the book also helps to reveal certain interesting commonalities 

among the different scholars who approach Strauss in this book, 

commonalities that are themselves revealing about the nature and form of 

Strauss’s contributions to political philosophy. It is hard to miss, for instance, 

how many of the authors begin with the observation that the chapter of 

Strauss’s work in question presents a central and immediate interpretive 

puzzle. To wit: Christopher Nadon begins his chapter on “Restatement of


1 3 7 

Xenophon’s Hiero” by noting that “it is surprising how little Leo Strauss’s 

‘Restatement of Xenophon’s Hiero’ has to say about Xenophon’s Hiero,” a fact 

which right away raises the question of what Strauss might really be doing in 

that essay (80). Joshua Parens opens his reflections on “Maimonides’ Statement 

on Political Science” by focusing on the “strangeness” of Strauss’s choice 

to devote attention to Maimonides. That strangeness, Parens notes, points 

directly to a series of big questions. Among these are: “Why, the reader should 

wonder, does Strauss engage in such historical studies, which are foreign not 

only to contemporary social scientists but also to the very thinkers, such as 

Maimonides, whom Strauss interprets in these historical studies (also) on 

Alfarabi, Hobbes, and Locke?” And “why does Strauss choose to write on two 

medieval political philosophers and two modern political philosophers, and 

why these two pairs: Alfarabi-Maimonides and Hobbes-Locke?” (116–17). 

Later in the volume, the first sentence of David Janssens’s chapter is: “The 

presence of ‘On a Forgotten Kind of Writing’ within the whole of What Is 

Political Philosophy? is somewhat puzzling,” since it seems at first glance that 

the chapter is out of place in the book (173). Why is it there, then, and how 

does it fit? It’s a question similar to those that Susan Meld Shell raises about 

Strauss’s last formal chapter in What Is Political Philosophy?, the subject of 

which is his friend Kurt Riezler. “An immediate question thus presents itself,” 

Shell writes. “Why end a book devoted to the explication and recovery of 

political philosophy with what could be deemed a personal eulogy?” (191). 

All of these questions are provocative and productive on their own. But 

taken in their pattern these chapter openings add up to more than the sum 

of their parts. They work to show both what it means to read with Strauss 

and what it means to read within Strauss. Together, they bring to the fore the 

kind of intellectual mystery that energizes Strauss’s teaching and has made it 

so seductive to so many. Just as Strauss’s writings, as Daniel Tanguay puts it, 

“succeed in rendering the quest for truth again exciting and challenging” by 

returning to fundamental questions and searching for the hints and subtleties 

that might ground some rediscovery of deeper meaning, these writings have 

similar success by approaching Strauss’s own work in the same way (111). 

These chapter openings also demonstrate the combination of humility 

and boldness that are distinctive of a Straussian approach: one must 

be humble when encountering the writing of great thinkers, particularly 

thinkers who are political philosophers. So when confronted with a seeming 

inconsistency or incoherence in such writing, one must not dismiss it as a 

careless mistake but take it as a clue, potentially, to some more ambiguous


and esoteric teaching. At the same time, one must be brave enough to expose 

the big mysteries, to ask the big questions, to plumb deeply and doggedly 

in the territory of big ideas, and to dare big answers. One must be humble 

enough to search for a hidden or ambiguous teaching through careful and 

patient study, but one must be bold enough to venture and ventriloquize that 

teaching in a great thinker’s name. The student of political philosophy must 

learn to inhabit a very particular intellectual space; the search for that space 

is sought and modeled here. 

In combination, in other words, these essays do more than elaborate and 

explain certain arguments in Strauss’s work, although they do that well. They 

also echo and apply Strauss’s style of interpretation to his own writing. In 

doing so, they demonstrate Strauss’s appeal not just as a political philosopher, 

but as a teacher of political philosophers. 

In his reflection on “On a Forgotten Kind of Writing,” Janssens picks 

up on one of Strauss’s most telling arguments, when Strauss takes up the 

question of why philosophers are so often engaged as teachers, especially of 

young people. Strauss claims that the philosopher is a person who values 

well-ordered souls. The philosopher thus cannot help but desire to help young 

people better order their souls—to educate them as potential philosophers. 

Thus, “the philosopher must go to the market place in order to fish there for 

potential philosophers.” 1 In so doing, the philosopher is bound to come into 

contact with the political men of his time, men who are bound to be suspicious 

of his cause. Thus, by Strauss’s account, the philosopher must learn to 

speak doubly, offering “a defense of philosophy that reassures the political 

men” while also “drawing the attention of thoughtful youngsters” (175). 

Janssens doesn’t make the obvious literary connection—to be fair, I can’t 

find any interpreter of Strauss who has made the obvious connection—to 

Matthew 4, in which Jesus begins his ministry by promising to make his 

followers “fishers of men” and then walking through the marketplaces of 

Galilee. Strauss’s quiet allusion to Jesus elevates the teaching of philosophy to 

a sacred plane. He suggests that for philosophers, some political shrewdness 

is probably necessary; one must speak the language of the marketplace in 

order to protect a place for what must be sanctified. The philosopher must 

be both a reverent and a political man. The theological-political problem, as 

so many of these essays observe, is not merely a problem for philosophy: it 

1 

Leo Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1959), 125.


1 3 9 

is a problem of and within philosophy. What political philosophy is, is the 

attempt to care for our souls. 

Such attempts will not always or often succeed. Strauss also, in that image 

of philosopher as a fisher of people, hints at the problems of studenthood 

(or discipleship); even when one has success attracting new and potential 

philosophers, the results of that initial success may be ambiguous or even 

dangerous. “All philosophy carries within it both remedy and poison,” writes 

Tanguay. “Strauss’s thought is no exception” (111). 

Major writes that “by posing questions with the patience to resist the 

demand for easy answers,” Strauss makes us “aware of the possibility of a 

life of the mind that does not stifle the voice of our hearts” (15). These essays 

remind us that, as Strauss taught, when we lower our heads to the page, we 

may elevate our selves. This volume, a heartful and mindful book, is itself 

worth the kind of attention Strauss devoted to the best written words.


Book Review: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful 

1 4 1 

Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful. 

Edited with introduction and notes by Paul Guyer. Oxford: Oxford University 

Press, 2015, 154 pp., $15.95. 

On Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry 

F r a n k N . Pag a no 

St. John’s College 

fpagano@sjc.edu 

The reissuance of Paul Guyer’s edition of Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical 

Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful prompts 

a reconsideration of Burke’s consistency: whether Burke’s early theoretical 

works are consistent with his mature political tracts and whether he is a 

consistent defender of the modern political and philosophical tradition in 

general. Guyer observes: “In his later political career, Burke was considered a 

conservative defender of tradition, above all the tradition of Britain’s ‘unwritten 

constitution,’ but in his youthful work in aesthetics he argued vigorously 

against the entire tradition of Western thought” (ix). A conservative, I shall 

initially suppose, tries to be consistent with a tradition on the grounds that it 

is traditional, but it is difficult to remain consistent with an entire tradition 

even if only a political tradition—not to speak of all of Western thought. A 

tradition may not be consistent within itself. Conservative consistency then 

requires selecting the points of consistency and giving an account when it is 

necessary to depart from a tradition in order to preserve it. 

How do we place A Philosophical Enquiry within the Western tradition? 

Chronologically it belongs with a series of philosophical works written during 

the mid-eighteenth century that include Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s first 

and second Discourses (published in 1750 and 1755) and Burke’s own first 



published work, A Vindication of Natural Society (first published 1756 and 

revised 1757). These works reevaluate the human implications of the Enlightenment 

project in light of the advances in mathematical physics, especially 

the more than half-century appropriation of the consequences of the publication 

of Isaac Newton’s Principia (1687). 1 Burke’s A Vindication and A 

Philosophical Enquiry have roughly the relationship to each other that Rousseau’s 

Discourse on the Sciences and Arts and his Discourse on the Origin and 

Foundations of Inequality among Men have. A Vindication has engendered 

strong disagreements about the degree to which it is a satire and what it is 

satirizing. 2 Nevertheless, according to the preface of 1757, “the design [of the 

work] was, to shew that, without the exertion of any considerable Forces, the 

same Engines which were employed for the Destruction of Religion, might 

be employed with equal Success for the Subversion of Government.” 3 Like the 

First Discourse, the purpose of A Vindication is to show the corrupting political 

influence of the Enlightenment. It is not merely a satire of the minor figure 

Lord Bolingbroke; the work also alludes to the political thought of Hobbes 

and Locke and probably Rousseau. 4 In contrast, A Philosophical Enquiry is a 

writing whose doctrines not only link religion and politics but might contain 

arguments for discrediting them. Like the Second Discourse it is an enquiry 

that seeks the origin of human ideas, in this case our ideas of the sublime and 

beautiful, both of which are related to the notion of inequality. The first task 

then is to consider whether young Burke is consistent with himself. 

Guyer notes that the enduring influence on aesthetics of A Philosophical 

Enquiry is to establish the two categories of the sublime and the beautiful 

(xxix–xxx). According to Burke these categories depend on pain and pleasure 

and the ideas associated with them that fall under the “two heads self-preservation 

and society; to the ends of one or the other of which all our passions 

are calculated to answer” (33). The sublime originates in pain or its expectation 

and the beautiful in pleasure. Guyer argues, rightly I think, that it is 

important that in the Enquiry the mental responses that the beautiful and 

sublime produce are physiological (xxvii). For example, Burke explains the 

effect of the sublime as increasing the tension of the nerves, a mechanical 

process understood in terms of Newtonian forces. Burke’s physiology is, of 

1 

Burke explicitly connects his aesthetics to Newton’s science (A Philosophical Enquiry, 103). 

2 

Edmund Burke, A Vindication of Natural Society, ed. Frank N. Pagano (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty 

Fund, 1982), xvi nn6–7. 

3 

Ibid., 6. 

4 

Ibid., 13n7, 15n8.


1 4 3 

course, quite primitive in light of later scientific discoveries concerning electrical 

nerve impulses. Yet I doubt that a comparable explanation employing 

nerve impulses changes the argument substantially. The physiological argument 

reveals that Burke’s aesthetics not only is compatible with Newtonian 

modern natural science but depends on it (103). 

Burke makes his aesthetics consistent with modern political thought 

through the argument that the passions of self-preservation that “turn chiefly 

on pain and danger…are the most powerful of all the passions” (33). The sublime 

is linked to passions more powerful than is the beautiful. Indeed the 

sublime is connected to the powerful itself and the beautiful to the weak. 

Burke goes so far as to argue that men are attracted to shows of weakness in 

women (88). Politics and religion depend on the idea of the sublime. Society 

cannot rely on the structures connected to pleasure and love because the passions 

associated with them are feeble. The familial passions are not strong 

enough to sustain political society. The commonwealth’s sovereign, just like 

the divine master, must be a “dread majesty” (55–57). The aesthetics of A 

Philosophical Enquiry is more consistent with the modern tradition linking 

Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke than with the ancient tradition of Plato, 

Aristotle, and Aquinas. A Philosophical Enquiry is a modern tract following 

modern natural science and modern political science. 

There are indeed ancient philosophies more similar to modern natural 

philosophy than are those of Plato and Aristotle. In the Enquiry Burke 

includes examples of the poetry of the Epicurean Lucretius, in the original 

Latin, and it is in the discussion of Lucretius that Burke breaks with the 

theoretical tradition of all the ancient philosophers. For Burke the ancient 

theoretical tradition cannot justify itself. Love, including philosophical 

friendship and the love of wisdom, is comparatively weak. It cannot resist the 

effects of the sublime. In the deepest instances it cannot resist the power of 

religious terror. Burke quotes (or rather, according to Guyer’s note [146n57], 

misquotes) three lines from the beginning of book 3 of Lucretius’s On the 

Nature of Things. These three lines appear immediately after Lucretius praises 

Epicurus. According to Lucretius, when Epicurus proclaims “the true nature 

of things revealed by [his] divine mind, the terrors of the mind are dispelled, 

the walls of the world dispart, and I see what happens throughout the whole 

void” (3.14–18). 5 The lines that Burke misquotes then follow. Guyer translates 

the misquoted Latin lines as “with these things a certain Goddess of pleasure 

5 

Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, trans. Martin Ferguson (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1969), 68.


drew me to you and what horror now to see your true nature revealed open 

and visible from every side” (146n57). On the basis of this quotation Burke 

criticizes Lucretius for his inconsistency: “Lucretius is a poet not to be suspected 

of giving way to superstitious terrors; yet when he supposes the whole 

mechanism of nature laid open by the master of his philosophy, his transport 

on this magnificent view which he has represented in the colours of such bold 

and lively poetry, is overcast with a shade of secret dread and horror” (56–57). 

Whether or not Burke’s misquotation is intentional, he interprets the lines to 

mean that ancient theory cannot overcome the human dread of an infinite 

mechanistic nature. The modern scientific vision of the world is too horrid to 

allow the philosophical life to enjoy the truth of the world without terror. The 

philosophical vision does not provide a safe refuge, a philosophical garden, 

from which to view the natural world. It does not produce a beautiful vision. 

In light of the discoveries of modern natural science ancient philosophy does 

not make for a pleasant and happy life. Even the ancient atomist Lucretius 

gives way to appeals to superstition. The scriptures do better than the philosophical 

poet at calling up the sublimity of the world and presenting it to the 

human mind (56). 

Burke supplies two justifications for his own Enquiry—the one from 

theology and the other from philosophical utility (44–46). They seem to 

work against each other. The theological argument extols the study of the 

passions and the “organs of the mind” as an “uncommon union of science 

and admiration” in which we discover God’s “strength and wisdom even in 

our weakness and imperfection, honouring them where we discover them 

clearly, and adoring their profundity where we are lost in our search. …We 

may be admitted into the counsels of the Almighty by a consideration of his 

works. The Elevation of the mind ought to be the principal end of all our 

studies” (45). Yet it is not evident that discovering the laws of human passions 

that begin in the sensations of pain and pleasure results in the elevation of 

the human mind rather than its reduction to the level of its primitive animal 

sensations of pain and pleasure. Do we find that the human mind is very little 

like the divine mind that designed it? The aesthetic doctrine of the Enquiry 

does seem, however, altogether compatible with the hope to gain power over 

humanity. Burke gives his second reason for his study: “But besides this great 

[theological] purpose, a consideration of the rationale of our passions seems 

to me very necessary for all who would affect them upon solid and sure 

principles. …To affect them after a delicate manner, or to judge properly of 

any work designed to affect them, we should know the exact boundaries of 

their several jurisdictions; we should pursue them through all their variety


1 4 5 

of operations and pierce into the inmost and what might appear inaccessible 

parts of our nature” (46). The two justifications for the Enquiry do not seem 

to have a theoretical reconciliation in the Enquiry itself. Modern philosophy 

depends on biblical revelation to sustain it as it penetrates into the confused 

realm of the inmost human mind. Contrary to its own philosophical findings 

about the mind, the theological argument of the Enquiry must presume that 

the discovery of the laws of the mind, however low or horrible these laws may 

indicate the mind is, elevate the mind. Certainly they increase the power of 

the one with the science to affect the minds of other men. In this regard it is 

a pursuit of power and power is sublime. Yet the sublime is also terrible. Not 

everything terrible is elevated (serpents). It is only the theological argument 

that assures that the pursuit of the science will elevate the mind. There does 

not seem to be a theoretical argument that unites the two purposes for pursuing 

the science of the mind: elevation of the mind in imitation of God’s and 

the useful power over the passions of the minds of humans in general. The 

science of the Enquiry therefore does not seem to contradict the underlying 

argument of A Vindication of Natural Society. Modern natural and political 

philosophies, which, according to Burke, actually rely on the support of 

the biblical religions, may subvert the religious foundations of society and 

therewith the foundations of modern philosophy. The young Burke seems to 

be consistent with himself. It is modern philosophy, according to him, that 

has brought into itself the paradox of relying on biblical religion and at the 

same time tending to subvert it. Does the Enquiry suggest any practical way 

to reconcile biblical religion and modern political philosophy? 

Burke insisted that his mature political career was consistent, although 

his opponents accused him of inconsistency in his support of the American 

colonists against the home government and his opposition to the French 

Revolution. He did not in fact regard himself as a conservative, a term coined, 

I believe, by Chateaubriand in the nineteenth century, but as an old Whig. 

His career, he maintained, was devoted to a consistent defense of the mixed 

constitution revived in the Whig revolution of 1688. Like him, the old Whigs 

defended the ancient constitution in their revolution. They did not remake 

it. Neither politics nor morals are a product of a comprehensive human art: 

“Dark and inscrutable are the ways by which we come into the world. The 

instincts which give rise to this mysterious process of Nature are not of our 

making. But out of physical causes, unknown to us, perhaps unknowable, 

arise moral duties, which, as we are able perfectly to comprehend, we are


bound indispensably to perform.” 6 The mature Burke did not think that there 

is a science that can construct the morals and constitution of a people. In this 

regard the Enquiry has nothing to add. Nation building is too complicated for 

human science. But is there a science that can defend a well-ordered society? 

And if so did Burke employ this science? 

The modern poet that Burke refers to most frequently in the Enquiry is 

John Milton. Milton was a republican—something the mature Burke decidedly 

denies that he is. Yet Milton was the master, according to Burke, of 

sublime poetry. It does not require subtlety to see that the absolute monarchy 

of Milton’s Satan, the progenitor of death, in a cosmic context replicates the 

absolute monarchy of Hobbes that also is dependent on the generation of 

the fear of death. In fact Burke praises the sublimity of Milton’s description 

of death (49). Milton’s poetry was consistent with the political taste of the 

instigators of the Whig revolution of 1688 that rebelled against the encroachments 

of the monarchy on the British constitution. The constitution of a 

people is too intricate, too refined for there to be an architect of its government. 

There is no science that instructs a statesman how to form a people. Yet 

there may be a science of the defense of the constitution of a people. Sublimity 

fixes the mind. Poets of the sublime may fix the tastes of a people. Using the 

science of the Enquiry philosophical critics may divine which poets are best 

for preserving and fixing the political and moral taste of a people and which 

corrupt it. In this way the young Burke is consistent with the mature Burke. 

Readers of Burke who charge him with inconsistency mistakenly treat the 

inconsistencies of the modern philosophical tradition as peculiar to Burke. 

He is a defender of modernity against itself. 

6 

Edmund Burke, “An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs,” in The Works of Edmund Burke 

(Boston: Little, Brown, 1899), 4:166.

Book Review: In Search of Humanity 

1 4 7 

Andrea Radasanu, ed., In Search of Humanity: Essays in Honor of Clifford 

Orwin. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015, 562 pp., $140 (hardcover). 

Dav i d L e w i s S c h a e f e r 

College of the Holy Cross 

dschaefe@holycross.edu 

It is uncommon to encounter a Festschrift honoring a scholar who has 

authored only one book—albeit an outstanding one—even when his work 

also includes numerous important scholarly articles on various topics. The 

diverse and generally excellent contributions to the present substantial volume 

make clear why Clifford Orwin is an exception to that rule. As several 

of the authors attest in writing, but all of them demonstrate by their example, 

Orwin is not only a learned, thoughtful, and provocative scholar; he is an 

unusually devoted and gifted teacher who has served as an inspiration to students 

and colleagues in the three disciplines he has taught for several decades 

at the University of Toronto (political philosophy, classics, and Jewish studies), 

as well as in related fields such as English and law. The volume of Orwin’s 

accomplishments consists not only in the publications appearing under his 

name, but to an unusually broad extent in the impressive work undertaken 

by those he influenced. 

The title of this volume draws on that of Orwin’s magnum opus The 

Humanity of Thucydides, one of the most comprehensive and illuminating 

studies ever written of that author. But it more fundamentally reflects, as the 

editor explains, Orwin’s career-long interest in the characteristic modern 

virtue of “humanity,” originally the Machiavellian, this-worldly substitute 

for Christian mercy or compassion, but one that was transformed over the 

course of centuries from a “hard” determination to protect human beings 



against the vicissitudes of nature or fortune by means that paradoxically 

included “cruelty” into a “soft,” Rousseauan “aversion to suffering as such.” 

In Search of Hunanity is divided into four parts, arranged chronologically 

by topic. Part 1, “Ancient Inquiries into Humanity,” includes several 

essays on Thucydides, as well as studies of Aeschylus, Xenophon, Aristotle, 

and Josephus. Part 2 explores the transformation of Christian charity into 

the modern virtue of “conquering” nature for the sake of relieving the human 

condition, as seen in or by such authors as Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Descartes, 

and Spinoza. In part 3, contributors examine “compassion and the 

angst of late modernity” in philosophers such as Locke, Rousseau, and Hegel, 

as well as the relation between reason and revelation in the thought of Leo 

Strauss. Part 4, “Liberalism, Humanitarianism, and Contemporary Affairs,” 

includes two essays on Kant; consideration of the modern doctrine of sovereignty 

and of the prospects for democracy in the contemporary world; 

a study of the relevance of Plato for the issue of “humane warfare”; and a 

“polemic” advocating “Socratic pedagogy” over “postmodern partisanship” 

in liberal education. 

Given the impossibility of doing justice here to all thirty-two contributions, 

I have chosen to focus on a number of essays that consider the crucial 

theme of the relation between freedom and necessity, or the extent of human 

moral responsibility, as conceived by Thucydides and several other great 

authors both ancient and modern. In the opening chapter, Orwin’s former 

student Mark Lutz examines how Aeschylus portrays the “civilization of the 

gods” in his Eumenides, showing how Athena educates the pre-Olympian 

Furies so as to overcome their identification of justice with traditional piety 

and the vindictive punishment of those who violate it. The play demonstrates 

how “the principles of justice may seem to contradict one another,” 

compelling citizens to “use reasoned argument” to apply them. At the same 

time, Lutz concludes, the Eumenides opens up the possibility—elaborated 

by Thucydides—that “reasonable gods” will recognize the extent to which 

human beings “are compelled by necessity to act” as they do, thus calling into 

question the grounds of punitive justice (human as well as divine) (14–15). 

A different perspective on moral responsibility in Thucydides is set forth 

in an essay by Orwin’s colleague Ryan Balot, “Philosophy and ‘Humanity’: 

Reflections on Thucydidean Piety, Justice, and Necessity,” which expressly 

challenges Orwin’s interpretation of that author. Whereas “Orwin’s Diodotus, 

and hence his Thucydides, maintains a version of the Socratic ‘paradox’ 

that vice is ignorance and virtue is knowledge,” and Orwin similarly regards


1 4 9 

“the Athenian thesis” regarding the compelling power of fear, gain, and 

honor, “suitably qualified,” as true—in contrast to conventional piety’s condemnation 

of hamartēma as blameworthy moral error—Balot attributes to 

Thucydides’s Athenians a doctrine of “moral luck” and a consequent “tragic 

world view” (manifest in Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannos), according to which 

human beings are responsible “even for acts that they committed under 

life-threatening duress” (20–21). One may question Balot’s use of Aristotle’s 

Ethics to support this extended view of moral responsibility, as well as the 

meaningfulness of his suggestion that Thucydides holds only “the flesh,” as 

distinguished from justice, to be “weak” (29). But Balot does offer fruitful 

matter for debate with Orwin in these regards. 

More moderate, and more in harmony with Orwin’s view, is the treatment 

of the role of treaties in Thucydides in an essay by Robert Howse and 

Noah Lawrence arguing that “the problem for right in Thucydides’ universe 

is not that it does not exist, but that it is vulnerable to the compulsions that 

bear upon cities…as well as dependent on a certain level of trust which can 

easily be broken in times of conflict” (36). Preserving treaties may hence 

require not only a certain balance of power among the contracting powers, 

but also “some appearance” of religious sanction (49). 

A more direct response to Balot is implied in S. N. Jaffe’s “Reflections 

on the Humanity (and Inhumanity) of Thucydides,” which emphasizes the 

“education to necessity” that the historian provides his readers, albeit one 

that is distinct from the “violent” but nonintellectual “education” inculcated 

by the Spartan laws. The real “tragedy of war” in Thucydides’s view, according 

to Jaffe, is not the fact of suffering but rather that political actors must 

inevitably act with uncertainty about whether a particular experience of suffering 

“can be averted” (58–59). (As Henry Kissinger emphasizes in his book 

Diplomacy, nations that await positive proof of their rivals’ hostile intentions 

before acting often doom themselves to far greater suffering—as the Western 

allies did prior to World War II, and as the United States may have done 

in its recently completed negotiations with Iran.) It is in his appreciation of 

this tragic aspect of the human condition, Jaffe suggests, that Thucydides’s 

“humanity” (and his contrast with Machiavelli’s nontragic view) lies. 

Passing over the outstanding Thucydidean essays by Michael Palmer and 

Andrea Radasanu, I turn to Lorraine Smith Pangle’s chapter “Moral Indignation, 

Magnanimity, and Philosophy in the Trial of the Armenian King,” 

on Xenophon’s Cyropaedeia. Pangle demonstrates how a Socratic-like understanding 

of vice as the product of ignorance of one’s true interest rather than


of malice (here, the teaching of a sophist), far from encouraging immorality 

(as Balot seems to fear), may moderate a conqueror’s conduct (just as Diodotus 

and his portrayer appear to have maintained). At the same time, Pangle 

intriguingly suggests that while Xenophon’s Cyrus (and his subjects) profited 

from his acquiring an education in the Socratic view of justice, his crucial 

deficiency is a failure to benefit from the Socratic understanding of “erotics,” 

and his consequent inability to reflect on “his own deepest yearnings” (113). 

The issue of moral responsibility underwent a fundamental transformation 

in the Christian world, as exemplified in Thomas Aquinas’s doctrine of 

synderesis, the faculty through which the first principles of the natural law, 

along with an inclination to follow them, are implanted in all human beings 

by God—thus making the individual wholly responsible (and deserving of 

punishment) for succumbing instead to his vicious desires. Henry Higuera’s 

essay “New Virtue for Masters of Nature” explains how Descartes, in turn, 

endeavors to portray his project of mastering nature for the sake of relieving 

man’s earthly estate—rather than directing him towards his spiritual 

perfection—as superior to the classical and medieval views, partly by means 

of “a reworking of the notion of free will” along with the “invention of a 

new highest virtue” of générosité (245). Descartes represents the sheer use of 

man’s “free will” or “the dominion we have over our volitions” as the ground 

of human self-esteem—regardless of the particular use to which we put our 

will (250). But Higuera supplies ground for doubting that Descartes actually 

believed in his free-will doctrine, regarding it rather as an exoteric doctrine 

best suited for winning popular support for the mastery of nature. (Although 

Higuera notes the democratic aspect of “substituting volition for habituation” 

in comparison with Aristotle’s moral teaching, it is less clear why it is any 

more democratic, morally, than the Thomistic doctrine, as Higuera contends. 

Higuera does properly stress Descartes’s revaluation of pride in comparison 

with Christianity, along with the “generous” man’s self-esteem in contrast 

with the love of the noble that characterizes Aristotle’s magnanimous man. 

Of particular interest, however, is Higuera’s observation of the proto-Kantian 

character of Descartes’s new doctrine [253–55].) 

This brings me to consider Arthur Melzer’s “Character vs. Free Will: 

Aristotle and Kant on Moral Responsibility.” Melzer aims to correct a great 

contemporary “misconception” about morality, for which he blames Kant: 

its equation with a “good will.” By contrast, he observes, for Aristotle “the 

‘will’ as a separate faculty and as the seat of morality does not even exist,” 

since morality constitutes a form of character that derives from habituation.


1 5 1 

Reflecting what Higuera represented as Descartes’s exoteric teaching, “modern 

thought under the influence of Rousseau and Kant conceives freedom 

to be not merely the precondition of morality but its very essence.” Yet this 

outlook contradicts the commonsense understanding of moral character as 

“the very opposite of freedom, something like ‘backbone’—that is, rigidity, 

fixity, and unfreedom” (436). 

While both Kant and Aristotle appeal to our “moral intuitions” to clarify 

the nature of morality, Melzer notes, Aristotle displays “the inner unclarity 

and complexity” of those intuitions, notably the “tension,” for moral action, 

between “freedom” and “fixity.” By contrast, Kant, following Descartes’s 

“anti-dialectical footsteps,” aims to discover an indubitable foundation from 

which morality can be systematically derived, at the expense of “jettisoning…a 

great deal of common sense wisdom” (437). Among the problems that 

result from Kant’s representation of morality as “self-conquest” is that it must 

be supported by a high level of moralistic, religious, or (recently) ideological 

passion—feared by Aristotle as “a dangerous and unhealthy” political force. 

The consequence, as seen in contemporary America (and as foreseen, I note, 

by Tocqueville), is a problematic combination of “hardheaded, enlightened 

self-interest” with moral and spiritual “enthusiasms”—reflecting Kant’s radical 

severance between moral virtue and happiness (441–42). 

Kant’s fundamental error, Melzer suggests, lies in his un-Aristotelian 

attempt to make morality, rather than wisdom, “the highest thing and give it 

all the dignity of rationality,” exaggerating the rationality of ordinary human 

life. At the same time, Melzer traces Kant’s rejection of habit-based morality 

to Machiavelli’s objection that it deprives men of the “flexibility” that 

the conquest of fortune requires—as reflected in the habit-free education of 

Rousseau’s Emile, in whom a passion like pity, patriotism, or religion instead 

provides the foundation of virtue. 

Here, then, we come full circle, from the attempt by Thucydides as well 

as Aristotle to tame excessive moralism and the vengefulness and irrationality 

it inspires; to the early modern endeavor, in response to the excesses 

of Christian theocracy, to redirect human desires towards the enhancement 

of earthly comfort and lengthened life-span, in harmony with philosophers 

who are now seen as advancing those goals; towards the resultant “angst” 

stemming from dissatisfaction with those “low but solid” goals, but without 

engendering an attempted return to the classical understanding of the relation 

between reason and society, producing instead an endeavor to create 

a cosmopolitan, egalitarian society on the basis of compassion (the other


greatest pole, besides Thucydides, of Orwin’s scholarship). Two excellent 

essays on Rousseau by Bryan-Paul Frost and Christopher Kelly, I add, show 

that the Genevan was far from an unqualified believer in such cosmopolitanism 

and egalitarianism—despite his subsequent influence in that direction 

(including his influence on Kant). 

It is an appropriate reflection of Orwin’s endeavor that three of the essays 

in the last two parts of In Search of Humanity—by Waller Newell (on Hegel), 

Susan Shell (on Kant), and Michael Rosano (on Socratic pedagogy)—dwell 

on the need, and the means, of preserving a genuine, questioning, greatbooks-based 

liberal education in the present time. Like his great model, Leo 

Strauss, Orwin has aimed to illuminate the fundamental human problems 

and encourage serious reflection on them, rather than advocate any sort of 

simplistic, partisan solutions. The contributions to this volume attest to a life, 

and career, well lived. 

This volume is incomplete in only one respect: it should have included a 

bibliography of Orwin’s writings.

Book Review: Democracy in Decline: Steps in the Wrong Direction 

1 5 3 

James Allan, Democracy in Decline: Steps in the Wrong Direction. Montreal 

and Kingston, ON: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 2014, xv + 181pp., 

$29.95. 

Thom a s E . S c h n e i de r 

University of St. Francis, Fort Wayne 

TSchneider@sf.edu 

James Allan has written a thought-provoking book about the decline of 

majoritarian democracy in five countries with the oldest such governments: 

the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. 

Despite important differences among these countries, he finds the same 

causes of decline at work in all of them, though not in precisely the same 

ways or to the same degree. The main causes are four: first, the behavior of 

judges, who as a class are less deferential than they once were to the elected 

branches of government; second, international law, to which judges and others 

increasingly look for guidance in domestic matters; third, supranational 

organizations, above all in the United Kingdom as a member of the European 

Union; and finally—and perhaps most fundamentally—the influence 

of “undemocratic elites,” who have shown a “loss of faith. . . in the ultimate 

good sense, and judgment, and morality of the majority of their fellow citizens” 

(122). This group includes even some elected politicians, not least those 

in the United States, “who at times prefer winning their battles in the courts 

rather than in the court of public opinion” (124). The evidence is striking, 

and the argument appears to be all but unanswerable except by those who 

put other considerations ahead of democratic decision-making. 

Allan concedes that the number of such people is not small. In his words, 

there are many who “want their democracy tempered by trade-offs,” such 

as federalism—the overrepresentation of small-state residents in the US 



Senate is a case in point—or even “a powerful judiciary interpreting a morally 

charged bill of rights” (137). The second example is closer to the heart of his 

argument, as three of the countries he examines—Canada (1982), New Zealand 

(1990), and the United Kingdom (2000)—have given themselves bills of 

rights in recent decades. (Neither the United Kingdom nor New Zealand has 

a written constitution, but their statutory bills of rights have been interpreted 

by judges much as if they were constitutional.) Few of these critics of democracy 

are willing to defend their views openly, however. Instead, they have 

adopted the ploy (as Allan calls it) of redefining democracy in “fat,” morally 

pregnant terms (132–38). “Democracy,” according to this new definition, 

“now requires particular substantive outcomes,” namely that “the laws passed 

and the decisions taken [by public officials] have reached a certain level of 

rights-respectingness” (133). As Allan points out, to speak of democracy in 

this way makes it very hard to say that an action a country has taken is both 

democratic and wrong. The new definition conflates two distinct criteria: the 

process by which a decision has been reached (democratic or undemocratic) 

and the outcome of that process (wise or foolish, just or unjust, etc.). 

Allan’s use of the word “ploy” suggests that those who have adopted the 

“fat” definition of democracy are being deliberately misleading. It seems just 

as likely that they lack clarity in their own minds. However that may be, it 

isn’t clear what he could say to someone who frankly avowed that he or she 

cared only about the outcome—that it be rights respecting—and was indifferent 

about the process. In a number of places he asserts that majoritarian 

democracies have a better record than other kinds of governments when it 

comes to rights-respectingness. Even if this is true, it cannot be an adequate 

defense of democracies over nondemocracies. If someone could prove that 

a nondemocratic form of government—perhaps a form not yet invented—is 

more rights respecting than democracies have been, Allan would then have 

to admit that his defense of democracy was a failure. Though he obviously 

thinks democracy is choiceworthy for reasons that go beyond rights-respectingness, 

he fails to offer a philosophical argument for his preference. He 

assumes that his readers are “partisans of democracy” like himself; he doesn’t 

tell them why they should be if they aren’t. 

In some respects Allan’s understanding of democracy resembles Abraham 

Lincoln’s—in fact he implicitly makes this identification by quoting 

the conclusion of the Gettysburg Address (162)—but his differences with 

Lincoln are just as revealing. Lincoln knew that an unobjectionably democratic 

process could result in a morally objectionable outcome; he had seen

Book Review: Democracy in Decline: Steps in the Wrong Direction 

1 5 5 

it happen when Congress repealed the Missouri Compromise in 1854 and 

thereby opened the Northern territories to slavery. At the same time he 

refused to join with the abolitionists, who thought that achieving a morally 

worthy outcome justified an undemocratic process. His response to the 

Kansas-Nebraska Act was to try to persuade Americans who supported this 

legislation that they were committing a grave mistake. Lincoln argued that 

the antislavery cause was grounded on the very same principle of equality as 

democracy itself. A consistent opponent of slavery must also be a democrat, 

just as a consistent democrat must also be an opponent of slavery. To put 

it in Allan’s terms, Lincoln believed that majoritarian democracy, “thin” as 

its conception may appear, requires a “fat” understanding of politics for its 

defense; and he argued for such an understanding. The absence of an argument 

for democracy that might win over undemocratic elites is the principal 

shortcoming in Allan’s otherwise insightful book.


Book Review: Sovereignty 

1 5 7 

Dieter Grimm, Sovereignty: The Origin and Future of a Political and Legal 

Concept. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015, 167 pp., $25.00 (paper). 

St e p h e n S i m s 


Stephen_Sims@baylor.edu 

In both political theory and international relations theory, few topics are as 

commonly or hotly debated as the advantages and disadvantages of the concept 

“sovereignty” for political life. The disagreement as it is usually defined 

in contemporary discourse could be posed in this way: is sovereignty, 

understood as the autonomy and attendant supreme power in a political 

community, a safeguard of a people’s freedom and a way of reducing international 

conflict, or is it the refuge of tyrants and all inhumane rulers who seek 

asylum from the watchful eyes of the “international community”? Although 

few reject the notion of sovereignty altogether, it is often proposed that its 

meaning be altered to fit the contemporary world, especially its concern for 

human rights and democratic freedoms. The question therefore arises: what 

did sovereignty originally mean, and how should we change its meaning? 

Drawing on political and legal theory on the subject of sovereignty, vast 

as it is, Dieter Grimm offers in this concise and elucidating volume an answer 

to the above question. He begins with a discussion of the problem of sovereignty, 

showing that the term is fluid and shifts over time, especially when 

applied to constitutional and federal states. The shifts in meaning, he suggests, 

help to explain why the concept is often reviled by well-meaning human 

rights activists, and why its supporters have trouble providing adequate 

definitions. Grimm then proceeds to offer a chapter on the political theory of 

Jean Bodin, who enunciated the modern theory of sovereignty, a chapter on 

constitutionalism and sovereignty, and a chapter on international relations 



and sovereignty. He concludes by considering contemporary debates over 

sovereignty, and offers a qualified defense of the usefulness of sovereignty as 

a way of protecting democratic governance. 

Grimm’s beginning focuses on the advantage of studying the concept 

through a historical lens, to counter what he calls “ahistorical” considerations 

on sovereignty (4). Because forms of political rule change over time, 

the content of sovereignty must also change over time. Likewise, because 

the terms signifying sovereignty took root in various locales and intellectual 

traditions, so the meaning of sovereignty will differ from place to place as 

well as from time to time. Although Grimm’s understanding of sovereignty 

as something nebulous throws into doubt the very existence of a reality that 

the term might signify, he nevertheless ends his introduction by claiming 

that sovereignty persists in today’s discourse because it signifies the enduring 

desire for a political community to be free. That is, it signifies a permanent 

political reality of sorts. 

Grimm turns to Bodin to uncover the original meaning of sovereignty, but 

acknowledges that Bodin did not invent the concept out of whole cloth. The 

term was traditionally applied to individuals who ruled—most prominently 

to God, but also to the pope. Grimm makes clear that although the term was 

in use during the heyday of feudalism, we should be careful to understand 

how it was used in medieval political theory. The primacy in medieval political 

theory of God’s rule over the cosmos, and of His natural law ruling over 

human law, is evidence that there is no place in that political theory for modern 

conceptions of sovereignty, with their emphasis on political autonomy and 

power. The older concept understands sovereignty as the power that attends 

a political ruler in his capacity as the dispenser of justice, rooted in natural 

law and originating from the reason of God. The sovereign was understood as 

ruler insofar as he participated in the natural and divine order of the universe. 

The traditional medieval concept has little to do with “autonomy.” 

The medieval political order reflected unity of faith, shared by Europeans, 

concerning the natural and divine order participated in by human 

beings. When that unity was ruptured through revolutionary Protestantism 

there arose the need for a new political theory, including the place of 

the ruler. If there was no agreement about the relation of the political order 

to the natural or divine order, what becomes of dispensing justice? Grimm 

relates the connection between the dawn of modern political absolutism and 

sovereignty—Bodin’s absolutism, like Hobbes’s, is founded on a desire for 

domestic peace that requires the limitation of political conflict, which in turn


1 5 9 

requires the centralization of political power, especially legislative power. 

This, of course, means that the claims of the church must be abrogated, and 

the laws of nature ignored. Although Bodin is famously unclear regarding 

the relation of the natural law to the sovereign’s will, Grimm concludes that 

his political theory offers only one criterion for the validity of a law, namely, 

the ruler’s will. 

In Grimm’s view, Bodin’s significance lies in his stabilizing the political 

order in the face of religious plurality, and he points to a number of historical 

examples to show this immediate effect that Bodin’s teaching had on 

Europe. Political theorists, statesmen, and lawyers, especially, in France, tried 

to understand the French regime in terms of Bodin’s theory of sovereignty. 

Hobbes’s political theory, moreover, can be considered a response to Bodin. 

Hobbes combined the irresistible power of the sovereign with the primordial 

freedom argued for by the Calvinists against Bodin, thus providing a liberal 

foundation and legitimation to political absolutism. Grimm claims that Locke 

saw a fundamental flaw in Hobbes’s political theory—humans do not merely 

wish to avoid violent death, but also want to be more secure from the oppressions 

of the state than Hobbes’s theory allowed. Accordingly, Locke attempted 

to liberate the people from the state by way of natural rights. Rousseau was 

able to combine human aspirations for freedom with the irresistible power of 

the sovereign by making the people the original and perpetual sovereign. 

In his next chapter, Grimm shifts his attention toward constitutionalism, 

with the obvious challenge it offers to the absolute power attached to sovereignty 

as theorized in early modern political thought. The replacement of 

traditional rulers with a legal document, of the rule of human will with the rule 

of law, led to some disquieting questions about where the authority to make 

such a law originated. The history of the early United States, in particular, 

poses vexing problems for modern political theorists. There was no concrete 

person or set of persons that one could point to as the holder of sovereign 

power, in the sense that Bodin defined it. Could law itself be sovereign? Or do 

the people as a whole constitute the sovereign, as the American Constitution 

implies? But how could an entire people wield sovereign power? Federalism 

added another wrinkle to the question of sovereignty: did the whole or the 

parts possess supreme authority? Grimm spends time on the nullification crisis 

in South Carolina, tracing out the main lines of debate as to whether the 

US Constitution was a document enacted by a single people, or whether it was 

more like an international treaty, as John Calhoun maintained.


Calhoun argued that because the people of each state participated in a 

shared historical experience, each state in fact was a distinct political community 

(as opposed to the American people). Thus in Calhoun’s political 

philosophy the problems come together: shared historical experience of individual 

peoples made it clear that there could be no sovereign American people, 

and thus no sovereign national government. The necessary consequence for 

Calhoun was that the Constitution, of necessity, could be only an international 

treaty. Searching for an alternative to Calhoun, Grimm suggests that 

Tocqueville’s theory of divided sovereignty was a good solution to the problem, 

but unfortunately he does not go into detail regarding Tocqueville’s and 

Calhoun’s competing notions about the origins and possibilities regarding 

the American experience. Regardless of what this comparison might reveal, 

Grimm argues that the perplexities of modern states, both constitutional and 

federal, concerning the doctrine of sovereignty are evidence that sovereignty 

remained fundamental to modern states, although what power it conveyed 

and where it lay continued to be the subject of much debate. Grimm concludes 

that the obvious problems of ascribing sovereignty to the “people” mean that 

sovereignty becomes a very different thing in constitutional states. As he puts 

it, “the sovereign remains only an abstract subject for the ascription of acts of 

public authority” (73). In other words, constitutionalism moved sovereignty 

away from Leviathan to whatever agency had care for the common good. In 

doing so, one might suggest—although Grimm does not take this step—that 

constitutionalism is more akin to medieval political theory than to modern. 

One of the effects of modern theorists’ ideas about sovereignty was the 

tendency toward centralizing political power around distinct political communities, 

which is the corollary to the decentralization of Christendom and 

the decline of the Holy Roman Empire. Modern international politics is the 

side effect of modern political theory, perhaps unintended but unavoidable. 

After uncovering the development of sovereignty in political theory and the 

rise of the constitutional state, Grimm reasonably turns toward “external sovereignty,” 

the sovereignty that is such a cornerstone of international relations 

and the flipside of the sovereignty found in the political theory of someone 

like Bodin. Grimm begins his discussion by arguing that the “crucial phenomenon 

in understanding modern sovereignty, in contrast to its medieval 

counterpart, is the territorialization of political rule by means of state formation” 

(77). In medieval politics, God and nature were standards by which the 

ruler could be measured, but modern politics is marked by the ruler being 

answerable to no one, either inside or outside the space over which his rule 

extends. Modern sovereignty therefore inheres within a certain space, and


1 6 1 

does not go beyond it. Control over the borders of one’s own political community 

now became far more important than it had been in the past. The 

corollary of that control is freedom from external rule. This freedom entailed 

a kind of “right” to be free from the rule of others, and thus sovereignty as 

a legal status, and with it international law, was born. External sovereignty, 

then, is the legalization of the rupturing of medieval Europe. 

When sovereignty is understood to inhere in territory rather than in 

persons, it becomes possible to identify a people with its territory rather 

than with its rulers, or even its form of government. France remains France, 

regardless of its regime, of whether it is ruled by a Louis XVI or a Robespierre. 

International law developed as a way of regulating the relations between 

such territorially distinct states. Because international law in its inception 

involved only states understood as being certain spaces on a map rather than 

individuals or regimes, it could not be concerned with the internal order of 

a state. Indeed, because international law relied on state sovereignty, which 

entailed freedom from external rule, the very notion of international law 

would be violated if it attempted to concern itself with the regime of a state 

and the relation between the ruler and the ruled. This point is not merely 

academic, for it gets to the heart of why something like human rights law 

did not exist inasmuch as international law could not in theory protect or 

advance fundamental claims about justice. To be sure, this did not mean that 

states were never moved by fundamental claims about justice—the historical 

practice of statecraft has always been a far messier affair than theories of 

sovereignty and international law allowed. 

The existence of state sovereignty, and with it international law based 

upon the assumption that each government is supreme within its own territory, 

also reveals why no higher body in international politics is theoretically 

feasible. Because the subjects of international law are sovereign states, and not 

individual humans beings, international law could at best be understood as 

customs and the “shared belief” that those customs were indeed law, including 

basic convictions like nonintervention. International law is not made so 

by any identifiable legislator, even in the case of treaty obligations—those 

obligations extend only to the signatories of treaties, and more importantly, 

they are self-imposed. Owing to the self-imposition of treaty obligations, 

international law as a whole can be upheld and enforced only by individual 

states willing to enforce the law. There is no supranational authority to do so, 

because such an authority would undermine the entire edifice, commonly 

called the “Westphalian” legal order.


Grimm rightly points out that this legal order has undergone some 

dramatic changes, especially in the last parts of the nineteenth century and 

the twentieth century, though those changes had small and conventional 

beginnings. International organizations were developed to deal with specific 

technical transnational problems, such as the Universal Postal Union. Statesmen 

attempted to forge a workable system of collective security via treaty 

obligations. These developments foreshadowed the contemporary international 

system, but did not change the nature of the system. As Grimm sees 

it, only World War II brought a fundamental shift in state sovereignty with 

the formation of the United Nations. Members of the UN gave up the right to 

threaten or use force to assert legal rights, and military power was relegated 

to “self-defense against aggression,” though the meanings of “self-defense” 

and “aggression” were left unclear. Grimm points out that promising never to 

use military force except for self-defense is not itself a particularly revolutionary 

act, since like all international law such a promise is self-imposed; what 

was revolutionary was the empowerment of the UN to use military force if it 

received the appropriate means from member states and was authorized to 

do so by the states that made up the Security Council. 

However impressive the UN is compared to previous international organizations, 

Grimm argues that it pales in comparison to the accomplishment of 

the European Union. The European Court of Human Rights, although adopted 

under the aegis of international law, allows states to take each other to court 

over alleged human rights violations, thus infringing upon the internal affairs 

of a state. Further, individuals are permitted to proceed legally against member 

states for violations of the rights guaranteed in the European Convention 

on Human Rights. But because the courts that adjudicate claims about human 

rights violations are themselves creatures of international law, the courts can 

only determine that a state has violated a treaty. It is up to other members of 

the treaty to enforce the law. While allowing for oversight of human rights and 

official venues to make claims about violations of human rights, the fundamental 

relationship between sovereign states remains the same. 

In the “core areas of European integration,” as Grimm calls them, classical 

international law no longer applies at all. Especially regarding economic 

policy, European states have transferred the rights long held to be integral to 

sovereignty to the European Union. As Grimm puts it, “in foreign affairs, no 

state is sovereign in the sense in which states were sovereign in the nineteenth 

century” since “they are no longer the sole rulers of their territory. Instead, 

external acts of a legislative, administrative and judicial nature—often


1 6 3 

enacted with the cooperation of the affected states but frequently without 

it—claim effect on this territory” (91). 

Given the specter of technocratic economists and judicial international 

control over the affairs of individual states, one might suppose that the future 

will truly be “postsovereign.” Grimm, however, is not sanguine about the 

future of a world run by international organizations that are responsible for 

no particular political community and, more importantly, accountable to 

no particular political community. He points out that because international 

organizations and supranational institutions must, of necessity, exist under 

the aegis of international law, they are not “self-determining.” They receive 

their raison d’être from the treaty, signed by states. Their legal basis is easily 

located outside the organization or institution itself, and thus they differ, 

essentially, from the legal basis of constitutional states. In other words, they 

are the artifacts of the will of those states that formed them. True political 

communities, like sovereign states, “decide upon the purpose and form of 

their political unity” (96). Thus, while certain powers that traditionally have 

been held by national government have been given over to international 

organizations, they cannot be called true political communities. It is through 

this fact that Grimm reopens the question of the continued existence of and 

justification for sovereignty. 

In order to defend state sovereignty, Grimm tries to show that the concept 

has “explanatory value and fulfills a function that cannot be expressed by 

related concepts” (103). Grimm argues that sovereignty does not mean unlimited 

power, or undivided power, or power in a particular person. “With the 

emergence of the constitutional state” only democracy could be recognized 

“as the legitimating principle for political rule…in the act of constitution 

making” (106). It is in this act of “constitution making” or laying down the 

fundamental nature of the regime—one might say founding—that we see 

the essence of sovereignty. It lies in the making of a political order. Grimm 

notes that it is in this that a sovereign state is fundamentally different from 

an international organization or a supranational institution. Thus, Grimm 

argues that what we mean when we talk about the sovereignty of a state is the 

ability of the people of that state to determine the fundamental questions of 

politics for themselves, and without requiring the consent of others. Various 

political powers can be handed over to international organizations, but not 

the power to determine the “identity,” in Grimm’s language, of a people. 

Grimm concludes by taking up the quarrel between those who defend 

sovereignty and those who argue that sovereignty must give way to a brave


new world of human rights. Grimm appears as an unapologetic defender of 

state sovereignty, which he believes is irreversibly attached to a kind of democratic 

understanding of politics. He points out that while serving “individual 

well-being” is good, we cannot forget that well-being “is always realized in a 

community” in which “there will always be different opinions about [its] meaning.” 

“The scope and range of human rights and the best way to accommodate 

conflicting rights are controversial issues and thus require political decisions” 

(125). To take those decisions out of the hands of local peoples would be the 

admission that democracy is not a good that makes a difference for well-being, 

and that ordinary men and women are incompetent to think about or express 

their views about what would be the best ordering of political life. 

Grimm fears that a world recognizing only those political forms that 

explicitly join human rights with democracy would delegitimize many 

states, removing the protection of international law for self-determination. 

One need only consider the Middle East to observe any number of states that 

could be condemned for human rights violations. To remove the mantle of 

international law from states that do not conform to liberal ideas of rights 

and justice would be to undo a great part of the labor of the twentieth century. 

While conceding the dangers of unchecked suppression of rights, 

Grimm finds that international organizations are greater threats to human 

rights than states themselves, perhaps because they are not accountable to 

anyone in particular. As Grimm sees it, “democratic principles currently find 

the best conditions for their realization in the context of the state. The more 

ambitious the concept of democracy, the less likely it is to be realized beyond 

the state.” Grimm concludes: “As long as there is no convincing model of 

global democracy, the source of democratic legitimacy and supervision must 

not run dry at the state level. Today sovereignty protects democracy” (128). 

One cannot help but think Grimm has pointed out a truth, albeit an 

unpopular one in these days when liberal internationalism as well as other 

cosmopolitan schools are prevalent. We must wonder, however, what Grimm 

really means by “democracy,” and whether he uses a helpful or problematic 

set of categories in trying to locate the political reality that “sovereignty” 

signifies. By democracy, Grimm seems to have an almost communitarian 

understanding of politics in which citizens deliberate together about their 

common life and share a deep-seated conviction about the nature of the common 

good, the virtues requisite for the pursuit of that good, and a firm belief 

that it is their business, as a community of friends, to deliberate about this 

good, and not the business of an outsider. Such civic republicanism of course


1 6 5 

depends on a firm commitment to the traditional moral virtues of bravery, 

temperance, prudence, and justice. It also depends on a spirited defense of 

one’s political independence. We know this from classical political science 

and from the modern republicanism of Rousseau and his followers. 

But is it the case that political communities actually possess the conviction 

that Grimm implies they do? Grimm points out that many political powers 

that used to be jealously guarded by political communities have indeed been 

handed over to bureaucratic technocrats, of whom one cannot responsibly 

assume a genuine care for the common good. Part of modern political theory 

has been the effort to depoliticize human nature, and in some ways it seems 

that it has succeeded, at least in the industrialized West. As long as the West 

continues to think in terms of modern categories—sovereign autonomy 

belonging to individual states and universal individual rights that require 

international intervention—it is unclear that any defense of democracy, or 

of any serious political life, will ever gain much traction. Although Grimm 

shows sympathy with constitutionalism in some form, and with democratic 

deliberation about the common good, he does not here offer a comprehensive 

understanding of politics that allows us to meet the threat of tyranny 

from unchecked sovereign states and the far darker tyranny threatened by 

omnipresent international organizations. But that Sovereignty raises these 

questions is evidence of the importance and value of the work of a clearly 

erudite and clear-thinking mind. Scholars of both international politics and 

political theory owe much to the work of Dieter Grimm.

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Fall 2015

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