NATURAL RIGHT AND HISTORY
Leo Strauss
University of Chicago Press, reprint (1990)
(first published in 1953)

"The attack on natural right in the name of history takes, in most cases, the following form: natural right claims to be a right that is discernible by human reason and is universally acknowledged; but history (including anthropology) teaches us that no such right exists; instead of the supposed uniformity, we find an indefinite variety of notions of right or justice. Or, in other words, there cannot be natural right if there are no immutable principles of justice, but history shows us that all principles of justice are mutable. One cannot understand the meaning of the attack on natural right in the name of history before one has realized the utter irrelevance of this argument. In the first place, 'consent of all mankind' is by no means a necessary condition of the existence of natural right. Some of the greatest natural right teachers have argued that, precisely if natural right is rational, its discovery presupposes the cultivation of reason, and therefore natural right will not be known universally: one ought not even to expect any real knowledge of natural right among savages. In other words, by proving that there is no principle of justice that has not been denied somewhere or at some time, one has not yet proved that any given denial was justified or reasonable. Furthermore, it has always been known that different notions of justice obtain at different times and in different nations....If the rejection of natural right in the name of history is to have any significance, it must have a basis other than historical evidence. Its basis must be a philosophic critique of the possibility, or of the knowability, of natural right—a critique somehow connected with 'history.'" Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (1990 edition), Chapter I, "Natural Right and the Historical Approach," pp. 9-10

BOOK DESCRIPTION
PUBLISHER
The problem of natural right is one of the most controversial and significant issues in contemporary political and social philosophy. Leo Strauss, eminent author of The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, examines the current status of this problem and shows that the reasons which have led to a rejection of natural right are not valid.

PUBLISHER
In this classic work, Leo Strauss examines the problem of natural right and argues that there is a firm foundation in reality for the distinction between right and wrong in ethics and politics. On the centenary of Strauss's birth, and the fiftieth anniversary of the Walgreen Lectures which spawned the work, Natural Right and History remains as controversial and essential as ever.

...Based on the Walgreen lectures he delivered in October 1949, which marked his debut at the University of Chicago, Natural Right and History was published in 1953 and first brought Strauss to the attention of a wide academic audience, especially in the United States. Not only has Natural Right and History remained Strauss's most popular work, but the issues this book raises have only gained in significance. Strauss there reopened the question of natural right, the possibility of a standard of justice independent of and superior to human agreement or convention. He sharply criticized what he called historicism, the claim that all standards and indeed all human thoughts are relative to or imposed by particular historical situations.He argued that the radical historicism so widely accepted today eventually followed from changes in thought set in motion by the modern natural right doctrines of Hobbes and Locke. He also challenged the dominant view that the classical natural right doctrines of Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero have been superseded by historical change, and reopened the possibility that the classical view of natural right might have important lessons for us today. Radical historicism calls into question the possibility of any natural right, including the modern natural right doctrines that have legitimated the only free and decent regimes of which we have experience...." (from Olin Center, University of Chicago website on 2001 Strauss Conference)

BOOK REVIEW
John H. Hallowell–AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEW
"Strauss...makes a significant contribution towards an understanding of the intellectual crisis in which we find ourselves...[and] brings to his task an admirable scholarship and a brilliant, incisive mind."