10 - Maimonides's Guide as a Work of Political Philosophy

Summary

Usually, it isn't difficult to say what discipline or science a book belongs to. Such is not the case for Maimonides's Guide of the Perplexed. This problem, however, is not limited to the Guide. Part of the difficulty comes from the side of the discipline in question, political philosophy. Although contemporary political science, even political theory, is generally confident (even overly confident) about what it is, political philosophy is less so.

What Strauss means by “political philosophy” by the time of his mature writings of the 1950s is quite different from what he means by “political science” in his interpretations of Alfarabi and Maimonides in his early writings of the 1930s (Philosophy and Law, “Some Remarks on the Political Science of Maimonides and Farabi,” and perhaps most openly in “The Place of the Doctrine of Providence according to Maimonides”). The former (later) conception is a far more comprehensive term in the spirit of the reference to “political philosophy broadly understood is the core of philosophy or ‘the first philosophy’” in City and Man (delivered 1962, published 1964); the latter (earlier) conception is much closer to the traditional view of political science as merely one of the sciences or as a part of science or philosophy. As Strauss explains in City and Man, “Not Socrates or Plato but Aristotle is truly the founder of political science: as one discipline, and by no means the most fundamental or the highest discipline, among a number of disciplines” (21). In this book, we've seen that the tendency to treat political science as a discipline was surely intensified by the medieval Christian tendency to deepen the divide between theoretical and practical science. The early Strauss, though he recognized the important influence of Plato in the political science of Alfarabi and Maimonides, did not yet fully appreciate the comprehensiveness of their Platonic political philosophy. His initial lack of understanding of the comprehensiveness of political philosophy in these thinkers may have contributed to his exaggeration of the importance of a pure form of theoretical science in Aristotle's sense.