Peter Berkowitz on Liberty and Morality

You’ve started with a very prominent name in modern conservatism that oddly has not appeared on anyone else’s list, Leo Strauss. Why Strauss and his 1968 book, Liberalism Ancient and Modern?

Strauss because he is, I believe, one of our most instructive thinkers and commentators on the history of political philosophy – ancient, medieval and modern. This particular book because it contains some of his most accessible essays. Many people have opinions about Leo Strauss, but only a small portion of those who have opinions have spent much time reading his books.

He is something of a hate figure on the left, isn’t he?

Very much so. Until 2003 or so that hatred was mostly confined to university professors who taught political science and philosophy. While I was immersed in the academy, I think it’s fair to say that he was the most hated academic. But in 2003, with the run-up to the Iraq War, he became more generally hated, because articles in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books and The Boston Globe asserted that Leo Strauss – who spent most of his life studying and teaching the history of political philosophy [and who died in 1973] – was somehow the architect of operation Iraqi Freedom, the Bush administration policy in Iraq.

Which is a little bit odd if you read this book, right?

Yes, this is a book of essays, but it is characteristic. Most of the essays represent interpretations of classic works of political philosophy – of a Platonic dialogue, of Lucretius. There’s an essay on the liberalism of ancient political philosophy. What I was especially interested in for this conversation, though, were the essays on religion and his two essays on the importance of liberal education to liberal democracy.

In the book he says that liberal education consists of listening to the conversation among the greatest minds and also in reminding oneself of human excellence, of human greatness. Is that what attracts you?

I’m glad you mentioned those lines. There is much more to it, but let’s start with the important lines that you’ve selected. What does he mean by those lines, and what are the implications? He means that the history of literature, the history of philosophy and so on is really a debate. Differences of opinion about what constitutes human flourishing and how we should live our lives, what is justice, what is injustice, what are the virtues that constitute a good life and so on; studying that conversation is the essence of the highest form of education that our civilisation offers. In other words, the education that he recommends is anything but dogmatic. It’s sometimes mistaken for a canonical education but the canon he is interested in is a canon that is constituted by disagreement over these important questions.

Why is he controversial then? When you put it like that it’s almost like a ‘great books’ truism.

Great books have often been rejected by the universities, so that’s the first answer: the truism is rejected. Secondly, setting aside the Iraq War controversy, which made him nationally unpopular and gave him widespread infamy, he was unpopular in the academy because he was a critic of the left liberal orthodoxy taught in the universities. In the departments I’m familiar with, especially political science, there is often an emphasis on teaching differences of opinion. But when teaching the correct opinion, usually it’s the correct progressive opinion about this political matter or that political matter and most people don’t like to have their opinions challenged. You would think that the universities would select people who do, who live for the challenge of ideas, but that turns out not to be the case. I have to add to this that while Strauss became hated because of the way he challenged liberal orthodoxy, a crucial aspect of his thought was to bolster liberal democracy, to strengthen our understanding of what the foundations of liberal democracy are and to provide inside instruction on how to make the case for liberal democracy better. He was a critic but his criticism was designed to strengthen, not to undermine.

If someone new to Strauss wants to start, is this book a good place to do it?

It’s an excellent place to begin. I would begin with his introduction in which he says a number of fascinating and accessible things about liberalism, conservatism, communism, and then the two essays on liberal education, chapters one and two.

On the subject of liberal education, you’ve got another book about education but it’s a novel, Tom Wolfe’s 2004 book I Am Charlotte Simmons, one of very few novels to make our list. Why?

He’s on my list as a book that conservatives should read and non-conservatives should read. Everybody with an interest in sex, soul and higher education should read I Am Charlotte Simmons. Those are the great themes of the book.

This is a novel set at the fictional Dupont University as seen through the eyes of an ingénue named Charlotte Simmons, who comes expecting a great liberal education and finds things are very different?

Yes. Charlotte grows up in Sparta, Georgia, I believe, on the other side of the Blue Ridge Mountains. She comes from red America and she’s a prodigy of red America – she’s the best student that her community has seen in living memory. She wins a scholarship to Dupont College and she’s sent off with great fanfare. What Wolfe explores is what happens when a prodigiously intellectually talented young woman, raised with a conservative sensibility, is parachuted and dropped into a representative, elite institution of higher education. What happens to her beliefs, what happens to her convictions, what happens to her cultural conservatism?

Is the answer that she finds herself in a conservative’s caricature of liberal academia or is it a bit more complex than that?

It’s a bit more complex than that, though I suppose some people on the left will say that it’s a conservative’s caricature.