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Strauss’s Machiavelli and Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor1 4 3consolation that religion inspires. 104 Although Strauss agrees that, “in a sense,all political use of Nietzsche is a perversion of his teaching,” he also emphasizesthe fact that “what [Nietzsche] said was read by political men,” fascist politicalmen more precisely, “and inspired them.” 105 Ultimately, Nietzsche “left…his readers” with “no choice except that between irresponsible indifference topolitics and irresponsible political options,” 106 such as that of Nietzsche’s heirand the “most radical historicist,” Martin Heidegger, who in 1933 “submit[ted]to, or rather welcome[d], as a dispensation of fate, the verdict of the least wiseand least moderate part of his nation.” For Strauss, this demonstrates “thatman cannot abandon the question of the good society, and that he cannot freehimself from the responsibility for answering it by deferring to History or toany other power different from his own reason.” 107 And it also demonstratesthat mass political nihilism could very well be the inevitable consequence ofthe Enlightenment’s ambition to turn all men into philosophers.5. Dostoyevsky’s Religious and Political ThoughtWhereas the modern project conceives itself as a break with the past, structurallysimilar to the previous break that has led to the collapse of Greek andRoman antiquity and the emergence on its ruins of the Christian MiddleAges, Dostoyevsky sees beyond these revolutionary changes of paradigm thecontinuity of a single fundamental reality: the West. According to the Russiannovelist, the perpetual Western ideal originates in the Roman Empire. Thereis thus a “Roman idea” that has three stages: the Roman Imperial, the Catholic,and the Socialist. 108 The Roman Imperial ideal was the forced unificationof mankind under the visible authority of the Roman Emperor. Representingthe power that brought the visible world from division to unity, the RomanEmperor resembled the Platonic demiurge who rationally ordered the chaoticpreexistent matter. For this reason, the Emperor was worshiped as a god,being motivated in his political actions by the desire to be glorified, a desirewhich, as indicated, Machiavelli also sought to cultivate and exploit. Thus, forDostoyevsky, the man-god has been the theologico-political cornerstone of104Tanguay, Leo Strauss, 42.105Strauss, “Three Waves,” 98.106Strauss, “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 57.107Ibid., 23–24.108Paléologue, Sous l’œil du Grand Inquisiteur, 213–14.