Leo Strauss's Socratic investigation of the natural law

This dissertation examines Leo Strauss's Socratic investigation of the traditional natural law doctrine through a close reading of his essays "The Law of Reason in the Kuzari" and "Locke's Doctrine of Natural Law." His philosophic treatment is contrasted with the juridical discussion of law or nomos in Carl Schmitt's Nomos of the Earth and Theory of the Partisan. Strauss's intransigent elucidation of the difficulties of obtaining knowledge of the natural law is an exemplary instance of Socratic rationalism. Strauss concludes that the natural law may only be known with probable certainty it cannot be proven demonstratively by reason because its existence depends upon the aid of revelation.Schmitt's rich treatment of law is very helpful in understanding the incoherence of modern geopolitics, especially the lack of connection between reality and theory in contemporary international law. But Schmitt's argument is defective insofar as he does not differentiate between reason and revelation or nature and convention.Strauss remedies these defects. He specifically distinguishes between what can be known by the unassisted reason and what can only be known with the aid of revelation. In the course of his discussion of Halevi's Kuzari, he shows that it is difficult to distinguish between the theologian and the philosopher while discussing the different ways of looking at the rational law.Strauss employs the form of an apparently pedantic book review of an edition of John Locke's Essays on the Law of Nature to conduct a dialectical examination of the traditional natural law doctrine. He shows that Locke's teaching is essentially the same as the Thomistic position. In his criticism of the errors of the editor he indicates the intellectual problems occasioned by acceptance of the contemporary doctrines of positivism and historicism. The balance of the essay is taken up with a philosophic reflection on the theological-political problem the emphasis is on the nature of God and its relation to the natural law. The central difficulties with the natural law are the apparently insurmountable obstacle of obtaining knowledge of the nature of God and reward and punishment in the afterlife necessary to establish the existence of the natural law.