Murray N. Rothbard vs. the Philosophers - Ludwig von Mises Institute

REVIEWS AND COMMENTS BY MURRAY N. ROTHBARD 103
welfare, is really good, and should bring happiness to the
tyrant. Hiero is apparently convinced.
Now, this is certainly a straightforward enough dialogue,
consistent with the general position of the Greek philosophers,
who—in contrast to their many virtues—always
tended to assume that the State is the best instrument for
achieving human goodness. Strauss, however, doesn’t like
this clear interpretation, and tries to spin an apologia for
Xenophon by labored, and even absurd attempts to try to
show that tyranny wasn’t really defended, that Simonides
was just trying to comfort his host, etc. Simonides was just
wisely trying to work with given systems (e.g., tyranny) and
trying to improve them—which, if true, I don’t think says
very much for the political philosophy of Simonides or his
author, Xenophon—or, for that matter, of Strauss.
It is impossible to detail here the flights of fancy of the
Straussian method, the unsupported assumptions of strategies,
games, rhetorical victories and traps, etc., that he
claims the two men engaged in to support his odd thesis—
and with none of these assumptions really backed by solid
evidence. I can only conclude that the book itself is worth
little or nothing, and that Strauss himself is at his weakest
when dealing in historical discussions of past political
thinkers.
I can only conclude, once again, from my readings of
Strauss, that Strauss is at his best on only one fundamental
point: when he is criticizing ethical relativism and advocating
a grounding of ethics on natural law (as he did in his relativism
paper). Any more specific topics, however, either in
detailed content of the natural law or in historical discussions
of political philosophers, shows Strauss to be a fallacious
political philosopher and a worse historian.
Cordially,
Murray