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science, to derive ends from passions, and have not acknowledged their failure, that Strauss is
not serious in his rejection of such an approach. Masters presents Strauss as ignoring,
deliberately and for some esoteric purpose, modern natural right; but this presentation is only
possible because Masters ignores, deliberately or not, Strauss’s many remarks in his other
writings indicating, without evident irony, the inadequacy of modern natural right. Put more
simply, what Masters sees as an ironic overlooking of modern natural right is rather a subtle
criticism of modern natural right. Masters is compelled to misread Strauss in this way because to
read him properly – to take him as serious when he contends that a nonteleological natural
science destroys natural right because one cannot give an adequate account of human ends by
treating them as merely posited by desires – would be to admit that Strauss had, in principle if
not in detail, seen and rejected Darwinian natural right, which Masters wants to offer as a
solution to the problem of natural right identified by Strauss.
Strauss comments on the problematic character of modern natural right in a variety of
contexts. For example, he begins “The Three Waves of Modernity” with a statement of the crisis
of natural right similar to that offered at the beginning of Natural Right and History: “the crisis
of modernity,” Strauss says, “reveals itself in the fact, or consists in the fact, that modern western
man . . . no longer believes that he can know what is good and bad, what is right and wrong”
(1989, 81). This “crisis of modernity,” Strauss reveals in the sequel, is “primarily the crisis of
modern political philosophy” (1989, 82). Modern natural right – the effort, based on a
nonteleological understanding of the whole, to derive right from passions or to establish ends on
the basis of desires or impulses – is, it seems, inherently problematic. Thus Strauss suggests in
another context that Hobbes – touted by Masters as evidence of the possibility of successfully
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