#19 Nasser Behnegar in defence of Leo Strauss’s critique of social science
Why did [Leo Strauss] this single-minded student of political philosophy devote so much of his time and energy to a critique of contemporary social science? This question assumes that political philosophy and social science are fundamentally different activities. However, Strauss questioned this assumption because he denied its underlying premise, namely, that modern natural science is the model for all scientific work. Accordingly, he can distinguish “present day social science” (social science positivism in its final form) from “classical social science” (the political science of Plato, Aristotle, and Xenophon) and “modern social science” (the political science of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu), categories that do not exist for adherents of present-day social science. Consider the following criticism of positivist social science with which Strauss began his “Restatement on Xenophon’s Hiero”:
A social science that cannot speak of tyranny with the same confidence with which medicine speaks, for example, of cancer, cannot understand social phenomena as what they are. It is therefore not scientific. Present day social science finds itself in this condition. If it is true that present day social science is the inevitable result of modern social science and modern philosophy, one is forced to think of the restoration of classical social science. [Strauss, On Tyranny, 177]
Strauss criticized present-day social science because it is not scientific, that is, because it denies what is known to common sense — namely, that tyranny is bad for political life. According to Strauss, the task of social science should be the clarification of common-sense awareness, a clarification in which common sense remains the standard for judging scientific results.
The difficulties that social science faces on account of its distrust of common sense knowledge can be seen more clearly if one considers the procedure of the humanistic political science that Strauss preferred. Aristotelian political science is guided by criteria of relevance that “are inherent in the prescientific understanding of political things” [Strauss, “Social Science and Humanism”]. To a contemporary social scientist, these criteria appear hopelessly subjective: what one man considers important, another considers unimportant. But it is precisely the awareness of this disagreement that leads intelligent and informed citizens to “distinguish soundly between important and unimportant political matters.” Every man is a member of a society, and what makes that society a whole is what it looks up to. There is a variety of societies (societies that look up to different things) and it is the disputes between these societies that constitute what is most important politically: “To illustrate this by the present-day example, for the old-fashioned political scientists today, the most important concern is the Cold War, or the qualitative difference which amounts to a conflict, between liberal democracy and Communism” [ibid.]. The universals that this science seeks are not laws of human behavior that apply everywhere but rather the various regimes and their purposes, universals that set in motion great political struggles and the quest for the knowledge of the ultimate universal: the true purpose of political community.
However, this political science cannot consistently maintain its apolitical character. On the most general level, the new political science is unpolitical because it denies the common good. In human terms, this means that man is fundamentally a selfish being. As Herbert Storing and Robert Horwitz show in their criticism of the work of Herbert Simon and Harold Lasswell, a social scientist who accepts this view should choose tyranny as his goal, a choice that Simon and Lasswell did not make [Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics by Herbert J. Storing et al 1962]. This is not surprising, for it is difficult as members of society to deny the fundamental assumption of society. Strauss suggests that the distinction between facts and values helps obscure the conflict between man’s political nature and the denial of common good. Whereas in truth the denial of the common good is based on the denial of the existence of genuine political wholes or the admission of the fundamentally selfish character of man, “the denial of the common good presents itself today as a direct consequence of the distinction between facts and values according to which only factual judgments, not value judgments, can be true or objective” (ibid.). Because according to this distinction one can posit “death as his value” no less than “self-preservation,” it is up to the free choice of individuals to choose or reject tyranny. Thus, the distinction between facts and values allows the social scientist to reject tyranny without examining the soundness of the premise that supports tyranny, a premise which he himself accepts. This rejection of tyranny is only the first but necessary step toward the politicization of political science.
According to [Strauss], the Western world is a unique community of nations because it is a community that is shaped by philosophy. The universalism of the European world and its universal appeal is due to this fact.
If a society has received its decisive orientation from philosophy or science, doubts about philosophy or science are apt to breed a lack of self-confidence in that society, and may even lead to upheavals as can be seen from the connection between irrationalism and various twentieth century mass movements hostile to liberal society. The crisis is serious because there are valid reasons for doubting the goodness of philosophy or science. These doubts cannot be resolved by an act of will, by a willful commitment to science, or by denying that science needs an adequate justification. Such attempts only deepen the crisis by revealing what has happened to men whose predecessors followed reason wherever it took them. As Strauss put it: “the almost willful blindness to the crisis of liberal democracy is part of that crisis” [Strauss, “Epilogue,” in Liberalism Ancient and Modern, 223]. According to Strauss, the crisis can only be met by an adequate political science, and it is this fact that is the immediate justification of Strauss’s interest in social science.
Nasser Behnegar, ‘Strauss and Social Science’, in The Cambridge Companion to Leo Strauss, edited by Steven B. Smith, Cambridge 2009 [pp. 215-216, 223, 226, 237]