Gourevitch Victor - On Tyranny

Leo Strauss

Alexandre Kojve

Leo Strauss

C ORRECTED AND E XPANDED E DITION
Including the Strauss-Kojve Correspondence

Edited by Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Chicago and London

Leo Strauss (18991973) was one of the preeminent political philosophers of the twentieth century. He is the author of many books, among them The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, Natural Right and History, and Spinozas Critique of Religion, all published by the University of Chicago Press. Victor Gourevitch is the William Griffin Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Wesleyan University. Michael S. Roth is the president of Wesleyan University and the author of several books, including Memory, Trauma, and History.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

1961, 1991, 2000, 2013 by the Estate of Leo Strauss

All rights reserved. Published 2013.

Printed in the United States of America

22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-03013-5 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-03352-5 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Strauss, Leo.

On tyranny : including the Strauss-Kojve correspondence / Leo Strauss ; edited by Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. RothCorrected and expanded edition.

pages; cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-03013-5 (paperback : alkaline paper) 1. Xenophon. Hieron. 2. Kojve, Alexandre, 19021968. Tyrannie et sagesse. English. 3. Kojve, Alexandre, 19021968Correspondence. 4. Strauss, LeoCorrespondence. 5. Political sciencePhilosophy. 6. Despotism. I. Kojve, Alexandre, 19021968. II. Roth, Michael S., 1957 III. Gourevitch, Victor. IV. Title.

PA4494.H6S8 2013

321.9dc23

2012051428

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

On Tyranny, Leo Strausss critical study of Xenophons Hiero, was first published in 1948. A French edition appeared in 1954, which, in addition to Strausss original study, included a French version of the Hiero, a slightly edited version of Alexandre Kojves important review of Strausss study, and a Restatement by Strauss that briefly replies to a review by Professor Eric Voegelin and goes on to challenge Kojves review point by point. A volume containing essentially the same texts appeared in English in 1963. We are happy to be able to bring out a new edition of this now classic volume, enlarged by the full surviving correspondence between Strauss and Kojve.

We have taken the opportunity provided by this re-publication to correct various errors in the earlier edition, and to revise the translations. We are particularly grateful to Professor Seth Benardete for his careful review of the translation of the Hiero. The earlier version of Kojves Tyranny and Wisdom required such extensive revisions, that we for all intents and purposes re-translated it.

We have restored the important concluding paragraph of Strausss Restatement which appeared in the original French edition but was omitted from the subsequent American edition. Unfortunately we did not find a copy of Strausss English-language original, and we therefore had to translate the published French translation of that paragraph.

In our Introduction we chose to concentrate on the issues raised in the texts that are included in the present volume, and in particular on the debate between Strauss and Kojve. Readers interested in the broader context of that debate will find it discussed more fully in Victor Gourevitch, Philosophy and Politics, III, The Review of Metaphysics, 1968, 32: 5884, 281328; and in The Problem of Natural Right and the Fundamental Alternatives in Natural Right and History, in The Crisis of Liberal Democracy, K. Deutsch and W. Soffer eds., SUNY Press, 1987, pp. 3047; as well as in Michael Roths Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth Century France (Cornell 1988); and in The Problem of Recognition: Alexandre Kojve and the End of History, History and Theory, 1985, 24: 293306.

We have been reluctant to come between the reader and the texts, and have therefore kept editorial intrusions to a minimum. Unless otherwise indicated, they are placed between wedge-brackets: < >.

Michael Roth found the Strauss letters among Kojves papers in the course of research for his Knowing and History. Kojves surviving letters to Strauss are preserved in the Strauss Archive of the University of Chicago Library. We wish to thank Nina Ivanoff, Kojves legatee, for permission to publish the Strauss letters, and Professor Joseph Cropsey, Executor of the Literary Estate of Leo Strauss, as well as the University of Chicago Archives, for permission to publish the Kojve letters. We are also grateful to Mr. Laurence Berns for placing the photograph of Strauss at our disposal and to Nina Ivanoff for placing the photograph of Kojve at our disposal.

Victor Gourevitch transcribed, translated, and annotated the Correspondence, and wrote the Prefatory Note to it. We collaborated on the Introduction.

V.G., M.S.R.

June 1990

We welcome this opportunity to restore the acknowledgment (unfortunately omitted from the first printing) of the efforts of Jenny Strauss Clay, George Elliot Tucker, Suzanne Klein, and Heinrich Meier in the early stages of transcribing Strausss letters, and of the help Herbert A. Arnold and Krishna R. Winston gave us in reviewing portions of the translation of the correspondence.

We are pleased to have been able to restore the concluding paragraph of Strausss Restatement as he wrote it. Laurence Berns very kindly placed his copy of the English original at our disposal.

We have corrected the typographical errors that vigilant readers were good enough to point out, and have brought some of the editorial notes up to date.

V.G., M.S.R.

September 1999

Strauss first published his Restatement (Mise au point) in the French De la tyrannie (Gallimard, 1954). He chose to omit two paragraphs from it in the English-language version which he published in What is Political Philosophy? (1959) and again in the Revised and Enlarged English On Tyranny (1963). We took the liberty of restoring the important last paragraph of the French Restatement in our earlier editions of On Tyranny, and we have been persuaded to restore the other omitted paragraph as well. It appears on page 193 of the present printing. We reproduce it from the clean and clear typescript in Nathan Tarcovs possession. We are most grateful to him for placing it at our disposal. We do not regard annotations by unidentified hands on typescript drafts as authoritative, anymore than we do speculations based on them. We wish also to thank Nathan Tarcov, Hilail Gildin, Heinrich Meier, David K. OConnor, Emmanuel Patard, and Olivier Sedeyn, for alerting us to omissions and misprints in the previous version.