INTRODUCTIONConnolly’s analysis resonates with one proposed by Heinrich Meier, general editor
of Strauss’sCollected Writingsand the author of several erudite and provocative studies
of the work of Schmitt and Strauss, and of their intellectual relationship. In hisLeo Strauss
and the Theologico-Political Problem,^138 Meier amplifies and systematizes one of the two
central questions obliquely guiding Strauss’s earlier works, namely: What constitutes the
political, and how does its classical and modern regime moderate or mitigate the age-old
relationship between reason and revelation, which, in the history of Western thought, has
been variably characterized by antagonism, analogy, co-dependence, and multiple at-
tempts at reconciliation and amalgamation? Meier recalls Strauss’s claim, inWhat Is Polit-
ical Philosophy?, that we are ‘‘compelled to distinguish political philosophy from political
theology’’ and cites his seemingly simple and unambiguous attempt to define their differ-
ence: ‘‘By political theology we understand political teachings that are based on divine
revelation. Political philosophy is limited to what is accessible to the unassisted human
mind.’’^139
Connolly highlights precisely what is contestable in such a view, which associates
cultural diversity with the abandonment of standards, rootlessness, perversion, or ‘‘abso-
lute tolerance,’’ and he formulates his own position as one that allows contestability—and
hence an emphatic conception of ‘‘deep’’ or ‘‘multidimensional’’ pluralism—as a matter
of principle, practical politics, and ‘‘existential faith’’ alike. The last, he notes, ‘‘consists in
a creed or philosophy plus the sensibility that infuses it’’ (p. 285).
Pluralism, even or especially ‘‘deep’’ pluralism, is not the same (as Straussians would
seem to believe) as ‘‘cultural relativism.’’ The latter tends merely to ‘‘support the culture
that is dominant in a particular place’’: ‘‘for relativism is most at home with itself when
it is situated in a concentric image of territorial culture. Here culture is said to radiate
from the family to larger circles such as neighborhood, locality, and nation.... Given
such an understanding of culture, a relativist is one who supports whatever practices and
norms prevail in each concentrically ordered ‘place.’ ’’ By contrast, pluralism opposes such
segmented unitarianism and is ‘‘ec-centric’’ by nature and temperament: it emphasizes
‘‘ec-centric connections that cut across the circles of family, neighborhood, and nation’’
(p. 280).
Such a pluralistic view would agree with Strauss that ‘‘absolute tolerance is altogether
impossible,’’ but it would espouse different—antiunitarian—civic virtues, which set limits
differently. Moreover, it would not think of these virtues and limits as attributable to a
single source, written in stone or fixed in eternally ‘‘unchangeable standards founded in
the nature of man and the nature of things.’’ Perhaps, Connolly suggests, Strauss himself
never believed they were, but thought of these claims as ‘‘politically necessary but philo-
sophically unanchored’’ (p. 282). This would put Strauss’s harsh criticisms of certain
liberal educators—such as Eric Havelock, whom he discusses inLiberalism: Ancient and
Modern—in a radically new light: ‘‘The virulence of Strauss’s attack on Havelock, then,
might express a desire to identify the single, universal basis of virtueora desire to veil his
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