Leo Strauss (1899–1973)
Author of History of Political Philosophy
About the Author
Leo Strauss (1899-1973) was one of the preeminent political philosophers of the twentieth century. From 1949 to 1968 he was professor of political science at the University of Chicago. He is the author of many books, among them The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, Natural Right and History, and show more Spinoza's Critique of Religion, all published by the University of Chicago Press. Catherine H. Zuciert is the Nancy R. Dreux Professor of Political Science Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame. show less
Image credit: Photographie du Professeur Leo Strauss
Works by Leo Strauss
The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism: An Introduction to the Thought of Leo Strauss (1989) 158 copies
Philosophy and Law: Essays Toward the Understanding of Maimonides and His Predecessors/Bk No 662 (1987) 81 copies
Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought (SUNY series in the Jewish Writings of Leo Strauss) (1997) 56 copies
Faith and Political Philosophy: The Correspondence Between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, 1934-1964 (1993) 43 copies, 1 review
Leo Strauss: The Early Writings, 1921-1932 (Suny Series in the Jewish Writings of Strauss) (2002) 31 copies, 1 review
Leo Strauss on Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra (The Leo Strauss Transcript Series) (2017) 28 copies
Leo Strauss on Political Philosophy: Responding to the Challenge of Positivism and Historicism (The Leo Strauss Transcript Series) (2018) 16 copies
La philosophie politique et l'histoire : De l'utilité et des inconvénients de l'histoire pour la philosophie (2008) 7 copies
Leo Strauss: Gesammelte Schriften: Hobbes' politische Wissenschaft und zugehörige Schriften - Briefe: Bd. 3 (2008) 5 copies
Jerusalem and Athens: Some preliminary reflections (The Frank Cohen public lectures in Judaic affairs) (1983) 4 copies
La critique de la religion chez Hobbes : Une contribution à la compréhension des Lumières (1933-1934) (2005) 3 copies
Le Discours socratique de Xénophon: Suivi de Le Socrate de Xénophon ; en appendice L'esprit de Sparte et le goût de Xénophon (1992) 3 copies
How to Study Medieval Philosophy 2 copies
Interpretation of Genesis 2 copies
Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft und zugehörige Schriften – Briefe (= Gesammelte Schriften 3) [3. Aufl.] (2022) 1 copy
El problema de Sòcrates 1 copy
Reason and Revelation 1 copy
Prirodno pravo i istorija 1 copy
QYTETI DHE NJERIU 1 copy
Associated Works
Did You Ever See a Dream Walking? American Conservative Thought in the Twentieth Century (1970) — Contributor — 86 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Strauss, Leo
- Birthdate
- 1899-09-20
- Date of death
- 1973-10-18
- Gender
- male
- Education
- University of Hamburg (Ph.D|1921)
University of Marburg - Occupations
- professor
political philosopher
classicist
historian of philosophy - Organizations
- University of Chicago
St. John's College
German Army (WWI) - Awards and honors
- Grosses Verdienstkreuz der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (1965)
- Relationships
- Klein, Jacob (friend)
Kojève, Alexandre (friend)
Benardete, Seth (student)
Bloom, Allan (student)
Rosen, Stanley (student)
Scholem, Gershom (friend) - Short biography
- Leo Strauss was born in a small rural town in Germany and raised in an orthodox Jewish home. He attended a gymnasium in nearby Marburg and then the University of Marburg. At age 17, he joined the German Zionist movement, in which he met many intellectuals and writers, including Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin. He received his doctorate from the University of Hamburg in 1921. In 1923, he began lecturing in Frankfurt under the auspices of a center for adult education. He published his first book, "Spinoza's Critique of Religion," in 1930, but found himself without a job a couple of years later. He won a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation to begin work in France on a study of the philosopher Hobbes. In Paris, he married Marie (Miriam) Bernsohn and later adopted his wife's son. The following year, he received an extension on his Rockefeller grant to work in London and Cambridge on his book on Hobbes. Unable to obtain permanent employment in England, Prof. Strauss emigrated to the USA in 1937. After a short stint as research fellow in the Department of History at Columbia University, Prof. Strauss held a faculty position at The New School from 1938 to 1948. He became a U.S. citizen in 1944, and in 1949 he became professor of political science at the University of Chicago, where he held the Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professorship until 1969. There he taught several generations of students and published 15 books. After retiring from the University of Chicago in 1969, Prof. Strauss moved to Claremont McKenna College in California for a year, and then to St. John's College in Annapolis, where he served as Scott Buchanan Distinguished Scholar in Residence until his death. Prof. Strauss's body of work spanned ancient, medieval and modern political philosophy. He wrote mainly as a historian of philosophy and most of his writings take the form of commentaries on important thinkers and their writings.
- Nationality
- USA (naturalized 1944)
Prussia (birth) - Birthplace
- Kirchhain, Hesse-Nassau, Kingdom of Prussia, German Empire
- Places of residence
- Chicago, Illinois, USA
Marburg an der Lahn, Germany
New York, New York, USA
Annapolis, Maryland, USA - Place of death
- Annapolis, Maryland, USA
- Associated Place (for map)
- USA
Members
Reviews
This revised and expanded edition of On Tyranny is made up of a linked set of texts ranging over more than two millennia of authorship. First is the translation of Xenophon's Hiero or Tyrannicus, in which the poet Simonides debates and counsels the tyrant Hiero regarding the enjoyability of a tyrant's life. Then comes On Tyranny "proper," the study of Xenophon's dialogue by twentieth-century philosopher Leo Strauss. Strauss' contemporary Alexandre Kojève, the eminent interpreter of Hegel, show more wrote a reaction to On Tyranny which appears in this volume as "Tyranny and Wisdom" and Strauss replied with a "Restatement." These two texts are paired here as The Strauss-Kojève Debate. Finally, the volume concludes with a publication of all of the personal correspondence between Strauss and Kojève that the editors were able to obtain.
As a US American in 2025 reading the original Xenophon text and Strauss' immediate analysis, I could not help casting our current tyrant in the role of Hiero. It was interesting to see that the dictator played the victim even in antiquity. (It certainly gives the comedian too much credit, but recent events incited me to flesh out the dialogue in my imagination by giving Bill Maher the part of Simonides.) The commentaries' post-WW II perspective on "modern tyranny" was of compelling interest as a sort of veiled prophecy regarding how thinkers might in the future reflect on the dismal episode of the MAGA hegemony.
A simplistic view of Strauss and Kojève places the former on the political "right" and the latter on the "left," and on that account I might have expected to have some serious sympathy with Kojève, but I found Strauss to be the clearer and more penetrating writer throughout, and I confess that like Strauss I see no way around Nietzsche's dismal assessment of the Hegelian chiliasm. The friendly and long-sustained personal correspondence between Strauss and Kojève was surprisingly rewarding. On the basis of some of their early exchanges, I have realized that I might profitably defer my ambitions to read Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit in favor of a prior reading of Thomas Hobbes (who has already been keyed to my interests by Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota).
As part of my larger reading project of Strauss' works, I was interested to note a condensed exposition of the thesis underlying Persecution and the Art of Writing. In his "Restatement," he writes that "in former ages, philosophy ... accommodated itself in its explicit or exoteric teaching to the unfounded commands of rulers who believed they knew things which they did not know. Yet its very exoteric teaching undermined the commands or dogmas of the rulers in such a way as to guide the potential philosophers toward the eternal and unsolved problems" (211). show less
As a US American in 2025 reading the original Xenophon text and Strauss' immediate analysis, I could not help casting our current tyrant in the role of Hiero. It was interesting to see that the dictator played the victim even in antiquity. (It certainly gives the comedian too much credit, but recent events incited me to flesh out the dialogue in my imagination by giving Bill Maher the part of Simonides.) The commentaries' post-WW II perspective on "modern tyranny" was of compelling interest as a sort of veiled prophecy regarding how thinkers might in the future reflect on the dismal episode of the MAGA hegemony.
A simplistic view of Strauss and Kojève places the former on the political "right" and the latter on the "left," and on that account I might have expected to have some serious sympathy with Kojève, but I found Strauss to be the clearer and more penetrating writer throughout, and I confess that like Strauss I see no way around Nietzsche's dismal assessment of the Hegelian chiliasm. The friendly and long-sustained personal correspondence between Strauss and Kojève was surprisingly rewarding. On the basis of some of their early exchanges, I have realized that I might profitably defer my ambitions to read Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit in favor of a prior reading of Thomas Hobbes (who has already been keyed to my interests by Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota).
As part of my larger reading project of Strauss' works, I was interested to note a condensed exposition of the thesis underlying Persecution and the Art of Writing. In his "Restatement," he writes that "in former ages, philosophy ... accommodated itself in its explicit or exoteric teaching to the unfounded commands of rulers who believed they knew things which they did not know. Yet its very exoteric teaching undermined the commands or dogmas of the rulers in such a way as to guide the potential philosophers toward the eternal and unsolved problems" (211). show less
One can read reviews of Strauss the reactionary or Strauss the left-wing nationalist, suggesting that Strauss is usually viewed through an ideological lens (ref. his assertion in The City and Man [1964] that political philosophy has been replaced by ideology). Anyone who incites such divergent interpretations must be on to something.
Strauss did not write aphorisms, nor did he commit to any easily identifiable position on anyone else’s spectrum of conceivable political positions. Instead, show more he wrote incisive, analytical commentaries on key classical and Renaissance texts in political philosophy, which he presented as attempts to excavate complex substrata of logic and purpose. Strauss believed that the understanding of a philosophical text required a reader to comprehend the intentions of the writer, “to study political philosophies as they were understood by their originators in contradistinction to the way in which they were understood by their adversaries and even by detached or indifferent bystanders.”
At the same time, he argued that certain philosophical texts were comprehendible only as a kind of esoteric writing—the writer’s true intentions conveyed subtly, concealed as in code. Uncovering the true meaning requires approaching the text from different angles. Consequently, Strauss’ own views are difficult to discern in his explications of the work of others. I mean not to imply that Strauss was some fuzzy obscurantist, only that he was a polygonal peg in a world of round holes.
The City and Man comprises three long essays—on Plato’s Republic, the Politics of Aristotle, and The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides—which together illustrate what Strauss took to be the advantages of classical political philosophy over modern scientific thought. His critique of modern (post-Enlightenment) thought was in part a lamentation, for what had been lost, as Strauss saw it; not so much a rejection of modernity as it was an attempt at a revaluation of principles that had been obscured.
Strauss plays the three Greeks off of each other while all along insisting on a genuine consensus of the wise. He clearly admired the Greek philosophers, for their emphasis on the rewards of prudence, moderation, and justice, and for their philosophical techné. Aristotle had great faith in man, in his inclination toward happiness and in his endeavors toward seeing and knowing for their own sake. Modern thought, writes Strauss, has rejected Aristotle’s view of a harmony between the whole of nature and the human mind, thus setting up nature as an enemy to be subjugated and overcome. Strauss himself was admirably skeptical of claims to ‘progress’: the advance of science and the growth of knowledge had not produced virtue and happiness, and political society had abandoned the cultivation of virtue for the pursuit of ‘freedom,’ i.e. “the freedom to live either nobly or basely according to one’s liking.”
Strauss’ Aristotle "founded political science as an independent discipline and discovered moral virtue, which for Plato had been only a kind of halfway house between political virtue (that which was in the service of self-preservation or peace) and genuine virtue, which animated only the true philosophers." The possibility of a natural, reasoned virtue is one of the pursuits that modern scientific thought has abandoned, according to Strauss, along with an ability to validate any value-judgments as proper.
Plato’s teaching could not be understood apart from the form in which it was presented, writes Strauss, and a crucial component of the form was a radical irony. Socrates, as a character in a poetic form (the Platonic dialogue), asserted the value of philosophy over poetry. Socrates described justice as the supreme virtue of the city, but the dialogue form exposed justice as untenable—not because justice was impossible, but because it was an idea “beyond all becoming.” Strauss’ succinct exegesis of Plato’s doctrine of ideas illuminates that notoriously difficult set of concepts, and the whole chapter serves as a valuable reminder of the genius of Plato. The Republic was contrived so as to say different things to different people, and perhaps Socrates (or Plato? or Leo Strauss?) did not primarily intend to teach a doctrine but "to educate human beings—to make them better, more just or gentle, more aware of their limitations."
The most surprising chapter in The City and Man is the one on Thucydides, whose book was not just a narrative of war but a study of the nature of war. Strauss, of course, was not to be satisfied with the traditional conception of Thucydides’ as a “scientific” historian. The surface narrative of the events of war “hid” a deeper stratum of thought. Strauss’ Thucydides was a philosophic historian: he was in fundamental agreement with Plato on the good and the bad, the noble and the base, and he shared with Aristotle the quest for a ‘common sense’ understanding of political things.
But for all that philosophical affinity, writes Strauss, the lesson of Thucydides’ work as a whole rendered questionable a presupposition of classical philosophy. "Both Plato and Aristotle neglected ‘foreign affairs’ in visualizing their perfectly good cities, whereas Thucydides taught that the city was neither self-sufficient nor was it essentially a part of a good or just order comprising many or all cities." In what has come to be recognized as a fundamental tenet of international relations, the unequal power of different cities inevitably leads to the consequences that "the most powerful cities cannot help being hegemonic or even imperial." The ‘anarchical system’ which characterizes the ‘society of cities’ and the omnipresence of war “puts a much lower ceiling on the highest aspiration of any city toward justice and virtue than classical political philosophy might seem to have admitted.” It’s hard to be good in war, which is not the same as being good at war.
The excavation of Thucydides’ thought from the narrative of the Peloponnesian War is the clearest example here of Strauss’ approach to esoteric texts. I didn’t even know that The Peloponnesian War was an esoteric text. And it’s not that one has to agree with Strauss, but that any claim to understanding that disregards Strauss would ring false and incomplete. Too many writers and scholars assume and then take for granted that the ancient Greeks gloried in war, that their greatest accomplishments were the consequences of victory in battle. Their own greatest narratives were war stories—Trojan, Persian, Peloponnesian. But Strauss’ esoteric reading of Thucydides allows for a reconsideration. “Wisdom cannot be presented as a spectacle,” Strauss wrote, “in the way in which battles and the like can be presented. Wisdom cannot be ‘said.’ It can only be ‘done.’” He was thinking not of Greek soldiers, but of philosophers. show less
Strauss did not write aphorisms, nor did he commit to any easily identifiable position on anyone else’s spectrum of conceivable political positions. Instead, show more he wrote incisive, analytical commentaries on key classical and Renaissance texts in political philosophy, which he presented as attempts to excavate complex substrata of logic and purpose. Strauss believed that the understanding of a philosophical text required a reader to comprehend the intentions of the writer, “to study political philosophies as they were understood by their originators in contradistinction to the way in which they were understood by their adversaries and even by detached or indifferent bystanders.”
At the same time, he argued that certain philosophical texts were comprehendible only as a kind of esoteric writing—the writer’s true intentions conveyed subtly, concealed as in code. Uncovering the true meaning requires approaching the text from different angles. Consequently, Strauss’ own views are difficult to discern in his explications of the work of others. I mean not to imply that Strauss was some fuzzy obscurantist, only that he was a polygonal peg in a world of round holes.
The City and Man comprises three long essays—on Plato’s Republic, the Politics of Aristotle, and The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides—which together illustrate what Strauss took to be the advantages of classical political philosophy over modern scientific thought. His critique of modern (post-Enlightenment) thought was in part a lamentation, for what had been lost, as Strauss saw it; not so much a rejection of modernity as it was an attempt at a revaluation of principles that had been obscured.
Strauss plays the three Greeks off of each other while all along insisting on a genuine consensus of the wise. He clearly admired the Greek philosophers, for their emphasis on the rewards of prudence, moderation, and justice, and for their philosophical techné. Aristotle had great faith in man, in his inclination toward happiness and in his endeavors toward seeing and knowing for their own sake. Modern thought, writes Strauss, has rejected Aristotle’s view of a harmony between the whole of nature and the human mind, thus setting up nature as an enemy to be subjugated and overcome. Strauss himself was admirably skeptical of claims to ‘progress’: the advance of science and the growth of knowledge had not produced virtue and happiness, and political society had abandoned the cultivation of virtue for the pursuit of ‘freedom,’ i.e. “the freedom to live either nobly or basely according to one’s liking.”
Strauss’ Aristotle "founded political science as an independent discipline and discovered moral virtue, which for Plato had been only a kind of halfway house between political virtue (that which was in the service of self-preservation or peace) and genuine virtue, which animated only the true philosophers." The possibility of a natural, reasoned virtue is one of the pursuits that modern scientific thought has abandoned, according to Strauss, along with an ability to validate any value-judgments as proper.
Plato’s teaching could not be understood apart from the form in which it was presented, writes Strauss, and a crucial component of the form was a radical irony. Socrates, as a character in a poetic form (the Platonic dialogue), asserted the value of philosophy over poetry. Socrates described justice as the supreme virtue of the city, but the dialogue form exposed justice as untenable—not because justice was impossible, but because it was an idea “beyond all becoming.” Strauss’ succinct exegesis of Plato’s doctrine of ideas illuminates that notoriously difficult set of concepts, and the whole chapter serves as a valuable reminder of the genius of Plato. The Republic was contrived so as to say different things to different people, and perhaps Socrates (or Plato? or Leo Strauss?) did not primarily intend to teach a doctrine but "to educate human beings—to make them better, more just or gentle, more aware of their limitations."
The most surprising chapter in The City and Man is the one on Thucydides, whose book was not just a narrative of war but a study of the nature of war. Strauss, of course, was not to be satisfied with the traditional conception of Thucydides’ as a “scientific” historian. The surface narrative of the events of war “hid” a deeper stratum of thought. Strauss’ Thucydides was a philosophic historian: he was in fundamental agreement with Plato on the good and the bad, the noble and the base, and he shared with Aristotle the quest for a ‘common sense’ understanding of political things.
But for all that philosophical affinity, writes Strauss, the lesson of Thucydides’ work as a whole rendered questionable a presupposition of classical philosophy. "Both Plato and Aristotle neglected ‘foreign affairs’ in visualizing their perfectly good cities, whereas Thucydides taught that the city was neither self-sufficient nor was it essentially a part of a good or just order comprising many or all cities." In what has come to be recognized as a fundamental tenet of international relations, the unequal power of different cities inevitably leads to the consequences that "the most powerful cities cannot help being hegemonic or even imperial." The ‘anarchical system’ which characterizes the ‘society of cities’ and the omnipresence of war “puts a much lower ceiling on the highest aspiration of any city toward justice and virtue than classical political philosophy might seem to have admitted.” It’s hard to be good in war, which is not the same as being good at war.
The excavation of Thucydides’ thought from the narrative of the Peloponnesian War is the clearest example here of Strauss’ approach to esoteric texts. I didn’t even know that The Peloponnesian War was an esoteric text. And it’s not that one has to agree with Strauss, but that any claim to understanding that disregards Strauss would ring false and incomplete. Too many writers and scholars assume and then take for granted that the ancient Greeks gloried in war, that their greatest accomplishments were the consequences of victory in battle. Their own greatest narratives were war stories—Trojan, Persian, Peloponnesian. But Strauss’ esoteric reading of Thucydides allows for a reconsideration. “Wisdom cannot be presented as a spectacle,” Strauss wrote, “in the way in which battles and the like can be presented. Wisdom cannot be ‘said.’ It can only be ‘done.’” He was thinking not of Greek soldiers, but of philosophers. show less
I have lost count of the number of good scholarly books I've read which have offered praise (or at least positive citation) of Persecution and the Art of Writing. It was on my list of books to read for about five years, which is impressive in itself, and even more peculiar in light of the fact that it's only about 200 pages long.
Although well and carefully written, Persecution and the Art of Writing is no easy read. The larger part of the volume is taken up with case studies from the show more writings of Maimonides, Halevi, and Spinoza, and readers unfamiliar with the the medieval and early modern Jewish intellectual traditions will benefit from reading a good encyclopedia article on each before approaching their respective treatments by Strauss, who assumes an informed, even elite reader for his exploration of the hermeneutical methods to be used with these writers.
Strauss proposes that prior to the liberal regimes of modernity, the greatest and most careful philosophers necessarily wrote in an apparently incoherent fashion, so that their true conclusions could remain "between the lines," cloaked by statements of permissible but dissimulating opinion. His notion of the "exoteric text" is one that is not merely accessible to the vulgar public--those whom Maimonides called "people of the earth"--but which conceals heterodox lures for "potential philosophers" under the cover of more conventional positions.
The admiration of certain Neoconservative pundits for Strauss has contributed to a posthumous view of him as a political reactionary favoring domination by rulers who deceive the populace. My own reading of Persecution and the Art of Writing does not support this claim; Strauss consistently represents his dissembling philosophers as seeking to perpetuate their ideas in the face of bigoted tradition. But given his insistence on the method of textual ambiguity, and the justification of answering fools according to their folly, my confidence in having interpreted his genuine thoughts is far from full. show less
Although well and carefully written, Persecution and the Art of Writing is no easy read. The larger part of the volume is taken up with case studies from the show more writings of Maimonides, Halevi, and Spinoza, and readers unfamiliar with the the medieval and early modern Jewish intellectual traditions will benefit from reading a good encyclopedia article on each before approaching their respective treatments by Strauss, who assumes an informed, even elite reader for his exploration of the hermeneutical methods to be used with these writers.
Strauss proposes that prior to the liberal regimes of modernity, the greatest and most careful philosophers necessarily wrote in an apparently incoherent fashion, so that their true conclusions could remain "between the lines," cloaked by statements of permissible but dissimulating opinion. His notion of the "exoteric text" is one that is not merely accessible to the vulgar public--those whom Maimonides called "people of the earth"--but which conceals heterodox lures for "potential philosophers" under the cover of more conventional positions.
The admiration of certain Neoconservative pundits for Strauss has contributed to a posthumous view of him as a political reactionary favoring domination by rulers who deceive the populace. My own reading of Persecution and the Art of Writing does not support this claim; Strauss consistently represents his dissembling philosophers as seeking to perpetuate their ideas in the face of bigoted tradition. But given his insistence on the method of textual ambiguity, and the justification of answering fools according to their folly, my confidence in having interpreted his genuine thoughts is far from full. show less
This book was developed out of a set of lectures given by Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago in 1949. It still has the character of three texts in six chapters, more than than it does a monograph, although they share a common subject matter and are set in a reasonable sequence.
A strange feature of the edition that I read is the cover design, which incorporates as background the title of the American Declaration of Independence. Although the idea of "natural right" may be wedded in show more American imagination to "truths" that "we hold ... to be self-evident," Strauss at no point references that document, or Thomas Jefferson, or US history at all. The Declaration of Independence is no more relevant to Strauss' discussion here than is Liber LXXVII vel Oz, and it was more out of engagement with the latter that I undertook to read this book.
Strauss is notorious as an intellectual mentor for some of the senior figures in the neoconservative faction of American politics, and I realized while reading this book that he may be ultimately to blame for the neocons' popularization of the term "regime (change)," inasmuch as he very carefully and conspicuously chooses "regime" to translate politeia as it appears in classical texts (136f.). However, the neocon usage signifies a particular government considered as individuals and the governing institutions they dominate, e.g. "the Netanyahu regime." This meaning is not in keeping with the larger sense of politeia as the socio-political integrity of a society. Strauss also observes that the traditional concept of "regime" has been superseded in modernity by the less coherent idea of a "civilization" (138).
Neocons' reading of Strauss is likely to have found some gratification in his treatment of Edmund Burke, the last of four figures surveyed here in the development of "modern natural right." Burke, now viewed as a philosophical founder of Anglo-American conservatism, gets some applause from Strauss for his valuing of practice over theory, and his recovery of a measure of the Ciceronian concept of political virtue. Even so, he is still shown as a sort of "last gasp" of such a sensibility, and his acceptance of individualism as a political principle places him on the same path of descent as the wider intellectual culture (323).
Throughout the book, and especially in its opening chapters, Strauss can be seen taking a stand (both with and against Nietzsche, see p. 26) in opposition to the sort of "historicism" that thoroughly relativizes political values, and thus dismisses the concept of natural right. He takes for a proponent and representative of the historicist school the sociologist Max Weber. I was fascinated in passing at a number of quotes from Weber, such as "Become what thou art" (44ff.), that seem highly Nietzschean, if not even Thelemic.
Strauss composed Natural Right and History (1953) at around the same time as Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952), and the method of a hermeneutic of esoteric writing, as understood by Strauss, is on display here. For example, in discussing Locke, the first of his four modern figures, Strauss remarks, "The fact that he is generally known as a cautious writer shows that his caution is obtrusive, and therefore perhaps not what is ordinarily understood as caution" (206). A more overt and detailed application of the method of esoteric reading is given in a long footnote discussing the possibility of Hobbes' atheism, where Strauss observes, "Many present-day scholars ... do not seem to have a sufficient notion of the degree of circumspection or of accommodation to the accepted views that was required, in former ages, of 'deviationists,' if they wished to die in peace" (198-199n.).
Glossing Plato and classical thinkers generally, Strauss tells us, "Philosophizing means, then, to ascend from public dogma to essentially private knowledge" (12). show less
A strange feature of the edition that I read is the cover design, which incorporates as background the title of the American Declaration of Independence. Although the idea of "natural right" may be wedded in show more American imagination to "truths" that "we hold ... to be self-evident," Strauss at no point references that document, or Thomas Jefferson, or US history at all. The Declaration of Independence is no more relevant to Strauss' discussion here than is Liber LXXVII vel Oz, and it was more out of engagement with the latter that I undertook to read this book.
Strauss is notorious as an intellectual mentor for some of the senior figures in the neoconservative faction of American politics, and I realized while reading this book that he may be ultimately to blame for the neocons' popularization of the term "regime (change)," inasmuch as he very carefully and conspicuously chooses "regime" to translate politeia as it appears in classical texts (136f.). However, the neocon usage signifies a particular government considered as individuals and the governing institutions they dominate, e.g. "the Netanyahu regime." This meaning is not in keeping with the larger sense of politeia as the socio-political integrity of a society. Strauss also observes that the traditional concept of "regime" has been superseded in modernity by the less coherent idea of a "civilization" (138).
Neocons' reading of Strauss is likely to have found some gratification in his treatment of Edmund Burke, the last of four figures surveyed here in the development of "modern natural right." Burke, now viewed as a philosophical founder of Anglo-American conservatism, gets some applause from Strauss for his valuing of practice over theory, and his recovery of a measure of the Ciceronian concept of political virtue. Even so, he is still shown as a sort of "last gasp" of such a sensibility, and his acceptance of individualism as a political principle places him on the same path of descent as the wider intellectual culture (323).
Throughout the book, and especially in its opening chapters, Strauss can be seen taking a stand (both with and against Nietzsche, see p. 26) in opposition to the sort of "historicism" that thoroughly relativizes political values, and thus dismisses the concept of natural right. He takes for a proponent and representative of the historicist school the sociologist Max Weber. I was fascinated in passing at a number of quotes from Weber, such as "Become what thou art" (44ff.), that seem highly Nietzschean, if not even Thelemic.
Strauss composed Natural Right and History (1953) at around the same time as Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952), and the method of a hermeneutic of esoteric writing, as understood by Strauss, is on display here. For example, in discussing Locke, the first of his four modern figures, Strauss remarks, "The fact that he is generally known as a cautious writer shows that his caution is obtrusive, and therefore perhaps not what is ordinarily understood as caution" (206). A more overt and detailed application of the method of esoteric reading is given in a long footnote discussing the possibility of Hobbes' atheism, where Strauss observes, "Many present-day scholars ... do not seem to have a sufficient notion of the degree of circumspection or of accommodation to the accepted views that was required, in former ages, of 'deviationists,' if they wished to die in peace" (198-199n.).
Glossing Plato and classical thinkers generally, Strauss tells us, "Philosophizing means, then, to ascend from public dogma to essentially private knowledge" (12). show less
Lists
Awards
You May Also Like
Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 78
- Also by
- 4
- Members
- 4,779
- Popularity
- #5,256
- Rating
- 4.2
- Reviews
- 21
- ISBNs
- 226
- Languages
- 16
- Favorited
- 14