Reviews of Books

Straussians

Republican Empire: Alexander Hamilton on War and Free Government. By Karl-Friedrich Walling. American Political Thought. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999. Pp. xii, 356. $40.00.)

Power versus Liberty: Madison, Hamilton, Wilson, and Jefferson. By James H. Read . (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000. Pp. xii, 201 . $ 47.50 cloth, $ 16.50 paper.)

Reviewed by K. R. Constantine Gutzman, Western Connecticut State University

These three studies of eighteenth-century political thought consider leading figures in the founding of the American republic: James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and the jurist James Wilson. If the subject is familiar; the approach is not. Most historians start from the supposition that context matters, that ideas bear the imprint of the time and place in which they are formed. Not so for the authors under review, all of whom have their origins in what has become known as the Straussian School of political philosophy. Named for the European emigré Leo Strauss, who fled Nazi Germany for the United States in the 1930s and spent the bulk of his career teaching philosophy at the University of Chicago, this school of thought spurns the modern "error" of historicism. For Strauss and his followers, the task of political philosophy is to articulate the timeless truths of morality and politics, as grounded in objective nature and expounded by the best thinkers of the past. The statesmen-intellectuals of the "American founding" gain particular attention. In their subjects' supposed effort to incorporate the enduring lessons of political science into the constitution of the American republic, contemporary Straussians find a compelling subject.

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Gary Rosen and Karl-Friedrich Walling did their doctoral work at Harvard University under Harvey Mansfield, perhaps the leading contemporary Straussian political philosopher, and James H. Read spent a year at Harvard under Mansfield's auspices as fellow in the Program on Constitutional Government. Their books demonstrate both the strengths and some of the characteristic weaknesses of the Straussian School as an approach to intellectual history. In the end, despite their flaws, these works—Walling's Republican Empire in particular—elucidate their subjects powerfully.

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