Leo Strauss, Max Weber, and the Scientific Study of Politics by Nasser Behnegar (review)

Abstract

Book Reviews 163 Nasser Behnegar, Leo Strauss, Max Weber, and the Scientific Study of Politics (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 221. ISBN 0-226-04142-5. £30. Leo Strauss argued famously that, 'no one since Weber has devoted a comparable amount of intelligence, assiduity, and almost fanatical devotion to the basic problems of the social sciences. Whatever may have been his errors, he is the greatest social scientist of our century.'55 It followed, in his view, that there was no better way to understand just what those problems are than by critically examining Weber's attempt to solve them. Leo Strauss' Natural Right and History first published in 1950 but based upon lectures given in 1949 is still one of the most important statements of his political philosophy. It also contains a powerful criticism of Max Weber's philoso phy that still has not been fully rebutted. One of the most noticeable features of this work is the fact that it contains, amongst chapters dealing with such figures from the classical tradition of political philosophy as Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Burke, one of the most challenging and controversial critical challenges not only to the work of Max Weber but also to the presuppositions and nature of modern social science ever made. Strauss's engagement with Weber takes place mainly in a central chapter of his 'Natural Right and History'. His examination of Max Weber takes place under the heading 'Natural Right and the Distinction between Facts and Values'. Strauss's account was deliberately meant to upset the prevailing orthodoxy in North America concerning the nature of Weber's philosophical and political ideas that had been created, to a large degree, by fellow intellectual refugees. Nasser Behnegar's main concern is to give an account of Leo Strauss's ideas about the failings of the modern idea of a political science. This study is divided into three sections. The first comprises a discussion of the basis of Strauss's rejection of modern political science. As far as Strauss was concerned modern social science had failed in its mission to be genuinely scientific. This was particularly self-evident in the case of that branch of the social sciences that took it upon itself to deliver a scientific account of politics. In the second part of his study Behnegar examines Strauss's crucial dissec tion of Max Weber's views upon the nature of social scientific inquiry. The third part of this study restates the main theme. Behnegar is convinced that Strauss has seen as no others had previously or so clearly that the predicament of modern social science rests upon its inability to face up to the problem of relativism. Strauss did not reject, as some assume, the possibilty of a science of politics. The question was what kind of science it could and ought to be. Clearly, with these considerations in mind Strauss's confrontation with Weber is of great significance. One basic problem as far as Strauss was concerned was that modern social science had become tied to an essentially positivist philosophy. As a consequence the funda mental premise of the operation of the moden social sciences is a commitment to a radical separation of the realms of fact and value. The difficulties that adherence to this distinction creates are most apparent in the discussion of political issues. For Strauss the fundamental problem was that the modern social sciences are hopelessly tied to a myth of value-freedom. However, the real problem is not that the modern 55. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1953), p. 36.© Max Weber Studies 2005. 164 Max Weber Studies social sciences are dependent upon an unworkable positivism but that they are deeply historicist in form and content. The Straussian objection to the state of the social sciences rests upon their foundational claim that science cannot establish valid value judgments and that human thought is essentially historical. The end result is moral relativism and nihilism. Modern social scientists, for example, found themselves unable to call Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Soviet Union tyrannies without breaking their own rules of freedom from value-judgments. Nor were...