Burns on Strauss’s Liberating Liberal Education

Abstract

Leo Strauss on Democracy, Technology, and Liberal Education is an invaluable source of historical learning and philosophic guidance. Timothy W. Burns provides us with an in-depth and careful study of four important writings by Leo Strauss that examine the challenges faced by modern democracy and the ways in which liberal education can supply a modest remedy. According to Burns, Strauss understands the problems facing modern democracy to be rooted in the ascendancy of technology as the ultimate political aim, which prioritizes acquiring the means to pursue whatever ends we happen to desire rather than the good life itself (9). Subsequent developments in the service of this goal have led to our present situation, which Strauss characterizes as “hardly more than the interplay of mass taste with high grade but strictly speaking unprincipled efficiency” (13; see also 35, 69, 75–78). Burns sharpens his analysis of Strauss by comparing Strauss’s understanding of technology with that of Heidegger. In contrast to Heidegger’s argument for a “new thinking” to address modernity’s ills, Strauss looks to an older thinking from which he gleans an argument for liberal education, which he describes as the cultivation of “an aristocracy within democracy,” i.e., a class within society whose thinking is informed by both serious education in tradition and the study of the Great Books (15; see also 21, 84, 166). Although Burns’s book addresses many aspects of Strauss’s account of the way in which technology came to dominate politics and shape our modern world, I will focus on the thread throughout these essays that explains what Strauss means by liberal education and why it is needed today.