Is there a natural framework for the social sciences?

Abstract

At the end of the introduction to Natural Right and History, Leo Strauss speaks of two opponents of natural right: historicism and the distinction in the social sciences between facts and values. In the first two chapters of the book, accordingly, he directs his attention to these two authorities of our time, “the twin-sisters called Science and History.” The transition between the introduction and the first chapter is smooth and subtle—and points immediately to the classics—while the transition from chapter 2 to the study of “the origin of the idea of natural right” is somewhat abrupt and loosely articulated around the return to the commonsense or prescientific world. It is as if the crisis of historicism had opened the door to the return to the classics, only to stumble on the unsolvable conflict of the many and contradictory principles “of right or of goodness” that tormented Max Weber. We contend here that the connection—between the paradoxes pervading modern social sciences and the return to the discovery of the idea of nature—is more than a mere literary device, or a “flashback” to the past where the idea of nature and thus that of philosophy emerged. The connection is this: the cure for the delusions of the social sciences regarding the separation of facts and values requires the recovery of the fundamental “light of the ideas of nature and science” that grounded the investigations by the Greeks of “various tribes to which they had access.”