This is the first in a three volume set published in France in the 1980s and in English by the University of Chicago in the 1990s. Here Ferry produces a thoroughgoing refutation of Leo Strauss’ thesis on modernity and the degeneration of political philosophy since the ancient Greeks. Strauss argued that, since the Renaissance, the Greeks’ conception of transcendent values and their concern for the pursuit of virtue in the Good Society had been replaced by historically-conditioned values and conventions and a misguided emphasis on individualism.

Ferry begins by demonstrating how Heidegger’s critique of modernity influenced Strauss. (This is the kind of book that illustrates how the best critics and commentators are able to bring a measure of lucidity and coherence that is not always manifest in the original works. Strauss’s thought was clear enough; the real benefit here is in Ferry’s treatment of Heidegger, and then Fichte.)

For Heidegger, modern metaphysics—after Descartes—placed human subjectivity at the center and foundation of the world, with man as the master of nature imposing the principle of reason on all beings, driven by the will to transform and dominate, but ultimately unconcerned with any end (not happiness, nor freedom) except the ‘will to will,’ the quest for power for the sake of power. In Heidegger’s version of modernity, unremitting production and consumption and the domination of technology leads finally to socio-political totalitarianism.

Heidegger’s analysis created the possibility of a return to the political philosophy of the Greeks, to a philosophy of nonsubjectivity in which nature is normative (each creature finding its place in the cosmos as a function of its nature and not as a function of a subjective norm of reason). As Ferry notes, Strauss’ critique of modern political philosophy was modeled on Heidegger’s deconstruction of modernity as the ‘imperialism of subjectivity,’ which demolishes any reference to a transcendent standard (a natural, nonsubjective law: Strauss’ Natural Right) and condemns man to an inevitably fruitless search for purpose, i.e. absolute historicism.

Having set the stage, then, Ferry takes Strauss to task. First, Ferry suggests that the whole quarrel between the ancients and the moderns is phony, more the structural opposition between two ideal types than a flatly chronological opposition. Both Heidegger and Strauss adopted without modification Hegel’s scheme for the stages in the development of speculative philosophy—from the Greeks to the Middle Ages to Descartes, Machiavelli and Vico etc—without acknowledging the subjectivity in Hegel’s choices. Strauss’ strict linearity undermines his argument by discounting both those moderns who almost belong with the ancients (Kant and Schelling for Heidegger, Spinoza for Strauss) and the oddly pre-modern ancients like the Stoics and Epicureans who were unable to prevent subjectivity from popping up in their philosophy. “Is there not some naïveté,” asks Ferry, “even paradoxically some historicism, in thinking that the ancients and the moderns are separate and succeed each other like ‘before’ and ‘after’?” Indeed. In Ferry’s view, Strauss’s traditional, linear history of philosophy glosses over the tensions and diversity that could undermine his thesis on modernity.

The second half of the book elaborates Ferry’s critique of Strauss’ treatment of the ‘second wave of modernity,’ which for Strauss encompasses Rousseau and the German idealists from Kant to Hegel. In Strauss’s view, Rousseau bequeathed to German philosophy a modern conception of freedom (with no basis in human nature and thus without means to distinguish freedom from license) and a rationalist theory of history (which equated the real and the rational and replaced the Good with an historically-derived general will, leaving no recourse to any consideration of what man’s natural perfection requires). Ferry points out three key errors that weaken Strauss’ critique of the second wave: Strauss’ misinterpretation of Rousseau’s conceptions of the state of nature and the general will (not hard to do, given Rousseau’s inconsistencies); Strauss’s allegation of a continuous, prevalent “realism” from Hobbes to Rousseau; and Strauss’ assertion of a uniform German view of history as the unintended but necessary actualization of humanity and the reasonable and just political order. The latter describes Hegel’s philosophy, but does not properly recognize the extent to which Hegel’s system was formed through a critique of earlier German “idealists” like Kant and Fichte. Strauss imagines a univocal German idealism that did not exist, writes Ferry.

Strauss does not really engage Kant or Fichte—the latter presenting the most formidable challenge to Strauss’ thesis. In Ferry’s analysis, Fichte displays none of Strauss’ criteria of modernity: he does not identify the rational with the real, does not dismiss the transcendent, does not privilege realism over idealism or politics over ethics or freedom over reason. Ferry writes that Fichte’s Science of Knowledge (1794) has been as ‘unintelligible’ for historians of philosophy as it was for Fichte’s contemporaries, so one can take Ferry’s analysis with a grain of salt, or acknowledge the remarkably sensible and straightforward presentation of terrifically complex ideas. A lot of this I had to read over several times.

As Ferry tells it, Fichte’s accomplishment was to formulate a critique of metaphysics from which he developed a philosophy of history that connects philosophy as thinking about the ideal of a system and politics as aiming at the embodiment of that ideal. Fichte’s starting point was to regard the distinction between subject and object, self and not-self, as a metaphysical illusion (following on Kant’s idea of ‘antinomy’ as apparent, not absolute, contradiction). For Fichte, the antinomial character of supposed opposites can be broken down thus: to justify themselves as thesis and antithesis, each must refer to the opposing principle they are intended to refute. Neither is what it is without the other. Hence the apparent opposites are both separate and connected. So it is with realism and idealism, subject and object, self and not-self, the individual and the universal. The concept of individuality is reciprocal, i.e. a concept we can have only in relation to another. For Fichte, positing the existence of others becomes a precondition for self-awareness; intersubjectivity, the relation between free individuals, appears as a precondition of individual subjectivity itself. Fichte saw the deduction of the existence of others as an indispensible prior condition for any thinking about rights; his philosophy of rights, premised on intersubjectivity, proves to be genuine political philosophy, the working out of the conditions conducive to the realization of man’s nature. “Man becomes man only among men,” wrote Fichte. What Strauss misses, then, according to Ferry, is how Fichte’s critique of metaphysics, starting with an illusion rather than an absolute, opens an area of intersubjectivity or communication between the individual and the other; deduces a synthesis of idealism and realism that explains the connection between self-awareness and the awareness of the world; and restores the ideal of a transcendent, anti-historicist ought as a prerequisite for a critique of the positivity of the real. No wonder Strauss never mentions Fichte. ( )