The Use and Abuse of Leo Strauss in the Schmitt Revival on the German Right—the Case of Heinrich Meier

Introduction The Schmitt revival has generated many interpretations of Schmitt—some on the left, others on the right—and has brought forth, as well, a variety of views about the relationship of Schmitt's Nazism and Anti-Semitism to the core of his political thought. But Heinrich Meier occupies a unique place in the new Schmittean canon. Before coming to Schmitt as a scholarly preoccupation, Meier was apparently working on " Biosozialismus " at the Carl Siemens-Stiftung, a form of social Darwinism supporting the thesis of " natural " human inequality (while leaving the racist implications to be drawn by others). This was one of many interests of Armin Mohler, the director of the Siemens Stiftung at the time, Meier's mentor and whose successor he would eventually become: Mohler is often considered a central intellectual figure of the postwar extreme Right in Germany (among his many works is one that contributes to Holocaust revisionism, Der Nasenring). 1 Whe n Meier turned to Schmitt, he found a unique angle for his scholarship, one that had been neglected by the right wing of the Schmitt revival; this was Schmitt's relationship to the Jewish thinker Leo Strauss, who left Germany shortly before the Nazis came to power, never to return. In re-establishing Schmitt's respectability and deflecting concerns about his Anti-Semitism, the fact that the great Strauss—a reverential student of Maimonides and his Greek masters—took Schmitt seriously and actually shared Schmitt's enmity to bourgeois liberalism might obviously be of some help. Before Meier, Stephen Holmes, a liberal American political theorist, had pointed to certain remarks of Strauss's in the 1930s about Schmitt as evidence that Strauss had outdone even the Nazi 1 A. Mohler, Der Nasenring: Im Dickicht der Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung (Essen: Verlag Heitz & Hoeffkes, 1989). 3 thinker Schmitt in his hostility to liberalism. As Berkowitz 2 , Behnegar 3 and myself 4 have argued, among others, this is not a proper reading of Strauss's thought, even at that stage of his career. Meier's brilliance however was to see in this discrediting of Strauss as a fanatical anti-liberal, a crediting of Schmitt. Indeed, Meier developed an entire (and highly favorable) reinterpretation of Schmitt on the basis of a short essay by Strauss on Schmitt written in 1932, and a few letters and marginalia that establish, according to Meier a " dialogue " between Strauss and Schmitt. Politischen: Zu einem Dialog unter Abwesenden " 5 , which consisted of …