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Strauss’s Machiavelli and Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor1 4 7between Protestantism and Catholicism. Thus, while liberalism affirmed freedomat the expense of equality and social unity, leading to a society wherethree-quarters of humanity (the working class) “served as raw material and ameans of exploitation” for the rest of mankind (the bourgeoisie), 121 socialismsought to impose equality and social unity at the expense of freedom. Whileliberalism led to “the comedy of bourgeois unity,” to a union of mankind basedon the principle Chacun pour soi et Dieu pour tous, 122 socialism was “nothingelse but a compulsory communion of mankind—an idea which dates back toancient Rome and which was fully conserved in Catholicism.” 123 To paraphraseStrauss’s reference to Locke as successor of Machiavelli, Dostoyevsky regardsboth the capitalist market and the socialist state as amoral, or rather immoral,institutional substitutes for brotherhood, the third ideal from the famousFrench Revolutionary triad, in the absence of which the other two, freedomand equality, could not be reconciled. But brotherhood is an essentially Christianideal that, as indicated, has long been abandoned by the West in favor of“lower standards” of ecclesial life. Or rather, ecclesial life, which is brotherlycommunion, has been abandoned in favor of ecclesiastic order, which is ajuridical formula based on rationalistic utilitarian premises that are also mademanifest later in both socialist collectivism and liberal individualism. 124However, although Dostoyevsky believed that, as an ideology, socialismwas by far more consistent than bourgeois liberalism, and that, for this reason,a socialist revolution that would lead to the collapse of capitalism wasinevitable in the West, he also believed that the project of a universal socialistauthority, as the final accomplishment of the modern project, would beconstantly undermined by the very premise of modernity. More specifically,while the cornerstone of the Enlightenment has been the criticism of religiousauthority by philosophical reason, Dostoyevsky and Strauss both insistthat once “philosophy as such” has been turned by the Enlightenment into“the element of human life,” 125 the incapacity of philosophy to reach a conclusionwith regard to the question of the right way to live inevitably leads tothe incapacity of the political community to find its unity around a commonconception of the way in which society must be organized. Otherwise said,121Ibid.122Ibid., 2:911, 1004.123Ibid., 2:563.124Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, trans. Kyril Fitz Lyon (London: QuartetBooks, 1985), 60–65.125Strauss, “Reason and Revelation,” 146.