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Strauss’s Machiavelli and Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor1 4 1neutralize the spiritual and otherworldly dimension of the Gospel? If oneaccepts all these premises, it can be easily seen how Machiavellian thoughtcould intersect with the thought of Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor. In theperspective of such a conjectural mutation of Machiavellianism, a consistentMachiavellian could find it quite natural to position himself, together withanother Catholic atheist like Charles Maurras, on the side of the efforts of thechurch hierarchy to neutralize what Maurras regarded as the anarchism thatoriginates in the Gospel written by “four obscure Jews.” 93◆ ◆ ◆Before we turn to Dostoyevsky, it is important to briefly summarizeStrauss’s view of the evolution of modernity after the Machiavellian moment.According to Strauss, the rejection of the classical scheme in favor of “lowerstandards of social action” defines the evolution of the first wave of modernity,which begins with Machiavelli and continues with Hobbes. In the latter’sthought, the desire for security replaces the desire for glory as the foundationof the social order. With Locke, the desire to live evolves into the desire tolive well, the main focus being not the Leviathan, but the market, throughwhich the selfish desires of the contracting individuals are satisfied. In thissense, Strauss argues that Machiavelli’s search “for an immoral or amoralsubstitute for morality became victorious through Locke’s…acquisitiveness,”“economism” being “Machiavellianism come of age.” 94 Inasmuch as itscoordinates are the replacement of virtue by self-interest and of communityby the market, the progress of the first wave of modernity might as well beregarded as growing decadence and alienation. As Strauss argues, Rousseau,with whom begins the second wave of modernity, is the first modern thinkerto articulate this perspective. But what first appeared to be a return from thefinancial “world of the bourgeois” to the ancient “world of virtue and thecity” has ultimately materialized in a leap forward that has inaugurated “amuch more radical form of modernity”: historicism. 95 Whereas the thinkersfrom the first wave of modernity reduced the distance between the Is andthe Ought, the doctrine of the general will, through which Rousseau soughtto surpass modern alienation, practically identifies them. 96 “The mere generalityof a will” now “vouches for its goodness,” so that “it is not necessary93Charles Maurras, Le chemin de paradis (1895), http://maurras.net/textes/217.html. Accessed June13, 2014.94Strauss, “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 51.95Ibid., 51–52.96Leo Strauss, “The Three Waves of Modernity,” in An Introduction to Political Philosophy, 92.