Rational Political Theory Research Articles

Yoram Hazony and Leo Strauss on the Relation between Philosophy and Revelation

ABSTRACTThis essay challenges Yoram Hazony's ostensible correction of Leo Strauss's account of the tension between philosophy and revelation in Hazony's book The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture. While Hazony persuasively demonstrates the value of the Hebrew Bible, notably the half that he calls the “History of Israel,” as a work of rational political theory, emphasizing the difference in function between the Torah and the Christian “New Testament” (which serves chiefly to “bear witness” to particular events, rather than account for the permanent character of human and political life), he wrongly accuses Strauss of sharing the position of the radically antiphilosophic Christian theologian Tertullian that the Bible and classical philosophy are “absolutely oppos[ed],” even though Strauss, unlike Tertullian, takes the side of philosophy rather than the Bible in this conflict. Contrary to the impression Hazony conveys, Strauss readily acknowledged that the believer, no less than the philosopher, is obliged to make use of reason in his quest for truth and noted the critical areas of agreement between the Torah and classical philosophy. He simply emphasized the conflict between philosophy's reliance on reason as the ultimate guide to truth and the dependence of the Bible on belief in divine revelation, a dependence that Hazony implausibly seems to deny. And Hazony's challenge to the very distinction between reason and revelation threatens to weaken our appreciation of both sides of this tension, which Strauss identified as the source of the West's “vitality.”

Military Tradition, the Human Costs of War and the 2008 Election

Opposition to the Iraq War is thought to have contributed to the election of Barack Obama in 2008. The present study shows that controlling for other factors, including the percentage of the vote going to the prewar Democratic presidential candidate, states with relatively high levels of Iraq War military fatalities had a higher percentage vote for Obama. This result is consistent with a prediction derived from rational political theory and the results of several studies examining the impacts of war fatality rates in other military conflicts in previous elections. However, in the current study, we find that the effect of Iraq War fatalities on the percentage vote for Obama is conditioned by state military enlistment rates. Military fatalities have a strong effect in states with historically low military enlistment rates. But the effect disappears in states with very high levels of military enlistment.

Religion, Rational Political Theory, and the 2008 Presidential Election

AbstractStates of the United States differ significantly in terms of politically salient religious culture. But prior to the 2008 presidential election several studies inspired by rational political theory that found that during war time voting districts with high rates of military fatalities were more likely to vote against incumbent candidates and for anti-war candidates failed to control for variation in religious culture. In the present study, multivariate analyses that controlled for local differences in religious culture found that Iraq War military fatalities had an overall positive effect on the difference in the percent of the vote received in the 50 states and the District of Columbia by the anti-war Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama in the 2008 election and the pre-war Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore in the 2000 election. Tests for interaction, however, also found that the magnitude and ultimately the direction of this effect were conditioned by religious culture. In states with very high percentages of evangelical Protestants, the military fatality rate actually appeared to have a negative effect.