In an indivualized social order of course different individuals will respond in radically different ways. That is a given. Create a position by throwing darts at a dictionary, and you will find some intelligent man or woman who supports that position... Carrol
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Well, sure. But Arendt and Strauss are not just anybody. They lived their times, analyze them and came to social and philosophical conclusions which are in many respects a reflection of the division in the broad historical spectrum of western liberalism.
How do you read the same books, share the same minority status, have the same experiences, go to the same universities, even share professors and come out on almost diametrically opposite sides on just about every important issue in politics and philosophy? Strauss loathed sociology as he did political science, historicism, and all the `new sciences of Man' created in the Enlightenment. Arendt essentially embraced them all with a certain analytical reserve.
Strauss's thesis was on Jacobi where he embraced the idea of a revealed truth as a potential extension of rationalism. Arendt wrote her thesis on Augustine only to discover that religious thought particularly revealed truths were fundamentally private and had little or nothing to contribute to her idea of the `public life' where rational thought and argument were carried on in public forums. Both cited the ancient Greeks to support their ideas, both absorbed Heidegger's lectures on Aristotle like mother's milk. Ultimately Arendt rejected Aristotle and Augustine, understood the Enlightenment quarrel with both (through her study of Roman history, where she found her concept of the public life). Strauss embraced them in a way that led him to reject the squabbling, contentious and indeterminant status of political and philosophical truths of the Enlightenment and went for the hierarchical and authoritarian aspects of Roman history.
Both were obsessed with figuring out their own identity as Jews in the modern world, and Arendt ultimately decided that was part of the private sphere (where she argued that Israel should not be founded as a religious state, but for a institutional separation between religious and secular authority)---in concordance with the US and French revolutionary tradition of separation between church and state. Strauss rejected this solution and believed to condemn Judaism to a private life was to erase it.
More later...
CG