time, other critics have portrayed Strauss as not so much an incompetent crank, more a kind of intellectual Moriarty, a spider weaving an insidious and hidden web that seeks to undermine liberal democracy. This Strauss seeks to effect a politics of lying and manipulation informed by the thought of Nietzsche or even by a kind of fascism. In this view, Strauss’s all-too-superior “philosophers” are supposed to rule over all-too-human subjects. For critics in this camp, the role of Strauss’s students in the “American right” (and above all the neo-conservatives who came to power in the White House of George W. Bush) reveals the inner truth of what Strauss has really been about behind the veil of traditional conservatism. For these critics, he is a false friend to liberal democracy, and his influence has been a disaster for American and global political life.
So, for the reader who seeks to be both critical and sympathetic and to find a middle road between the Straussians and the anti-Straussians, this leaves the question: who is Leo Strauss, and in what context are we to understand his writings?
Ironically, one of the challenges in answering this is that, in contrast to many contemporary thinkers, Strauss appears to write simply and straightforwardly. He largely shuns technical language, finding it abstract and unphilosophical – and so, at the level of sentences or even paragraphs, his writing can appear to need no introduction. The last few books he wrote may seem to be nothing more than uninspiring summaries of the texts on which they claim to be commentaries. It is certainly true that, when Strauss wants to, he can write with great clarity and beauty. The challenge in reading him is to keep track of the subtle and continual shifts and changes that come to light as he moves from one thought to the next. Things quickly become complicated as we start trying to put together the various things Strauss says.
Three further things in Strauss’s writing lead to even greater complexity. First, as we have already remarked, at the heart of his thinking Strauss emphasizes the irresolvable, problematic character of existence. This means that tensions and oppositions are themselves essential to Strauss’s thought. Even among his students there is wide disagreement about how Strauss resolves, characterizes, or even formulates these tensions. For example, the contrast or tension between reason and revelation is fundamental to Strauss’s thought, but Strauss’s readers differ in what they see him doing with the reason–revelation “problem.” There are atheistic, secularist Straussians and there are faith-based Straussians: both groups find a ground for their position in Strauss’s writings. Another example of this fundamental disagreement is Strauss’s assessment of the importance of ordinary civic or political morality. Some take Strauss to be a firm defender of such morals; others take the opposite view, that Strauss is in fact contemptuous of ordinary moral understanding. In general, I will not try to resolve these debates, but will suggest a formulation that seems best to cohere with what seem to be Strauss’s other thoughts. Staying with the problems more than any solution was in fact a central characteristic Strauss himself discerned in philosophy, which he saw to be the love or pursuit, rather than the actual possession, of wisdom.
The second major challenge to introducing Strauss’s thought is that the vast majority of his writings consists of commentaries on other writings, mostly works from the history of political thought in the western intellectual tradition (inclusive of the Jewish and Islamic Middle Ages), from the ancient Greeks to the twentieth century. In his commentaries he often assumed the voice of the author of the writing under discussion, or of one of the characters in a dialogue. Strauss only occasionally wrote in his own voice, and never provided a complete or comprehensive account or analysis of his philosophical claims. This, of course, increases the challenge of sorting out what Strauss’s thought is in its own terms. This indirect form of “communication through commentary” is not an accidental feature of Strauss’s thought; it belongs to his core claim about how philosophy arises from opinion, and how philosophy functions in the context of opinion.
The third great issue for the reader of Strauss is that Strauss claimed as one of his most important discoveries a tradition of “esoteric” writing in the western philosophical tradition, from the ancient Greeks through to the eighteenth century. He argued that many philosophers hid their teaching under an “exoteric” or outer form. This raises the obvious question: does Strauss himself also practice this art? We will discuss Strauss’s understanding of exoteric/esoteric teachings at length in chapter 3 – but at this point, it is important at least to recognize the complication it presents. In claiming to understand Strauss, the reader must acknowledge that Strauss himself might have – or perhaps should be presumed to have – a secret or “esoteric” teaching. This obviously disrupts the normal assumption that authors mean what they say, and so complicates the task of discerning what Strauss might mean.
These challenges to understanding and explaining Strauss’s thought have convinced me that a somewhat unusual approach is needed for a book such as this one that is trying to introduce Strauss’s thought in a balanced way, both sympathetically and critically. Because there is so much controversy about what Strauss’s position is, I have chosen to quote from him much more than is normal in an introductory book. Also, because his published writing is often complex and circuitous, I have made much use of his letters, unpublished writings, and lectures, where he is often clearer and more direct about his views. The huge advantage such an approach affords is that Strauss is a very good writer. His sentences are usually clear and, when he wants to, he can be wonderfully evocative and compelling. We will be trying to use Strauss to help us understand Strauss.
So while things can get complicated in trying to get at what Strauss’s thought consists in, and there is a large and vexed secondary literature, we will seek to find our way to the center of his thought by focusing upon the question that was for him at the center of human existence: what is the best or right life? Strauss’s work was a continuous response to this question.
The first thing is to provide an outline of Strauss’s life, and then to describe briefly some of the basic themes and claims of his thought as it seeks to think the question of the best life.
Who is Leo Strauss?
Leo Strauss was born in 1899 into an observant Jewish family in Germany. Even before attending university, he converted to “simple, straightforward political Zionism” (JPCM 460), and was involved in the Zionist movement during his twenties. Strauss studied philosophy at the University of Marburg and the University of Hamburg. While a student, he served as an assistant to Edmund Husserl, the founder of the school of phenomenology. Strauss attended some classes and seminars of Martin Heidegger, whom Strauss considered to be the greatest thinker of his generation. After completing a doctorate at the University of Hamburg under Ernst Cassirer in 1921, Strauss became a researcher at the Academy for the Science of Judaism in Berlin, focusing on the history of Jewish philosophy, including work on Moses Mendelssohn, Spinoza, and Maimonides. His first book, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, was published in 1930. At about this time, Strauss had what he described later as a “change of orientation” that opened up for him the possibility of a recovery of pre-modern rationalism. He later stated that the first expression of his “change of orientation” was to be found in his 1932 review of a book by Carl Schmitt, the important legal theorist who joined the Nazi Party shortly afterward. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Strauss was in France on a Rockefeller research fellowship. The following year, he moved to England to work on Thomas Hobbes. In 1937, he went to the United States, eventually securing a permanent position at the New School for Social Research in New York City. In 1949, Strauss began two decades of teaching in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He retired and was named Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago in 1968, but continued teaching and giving guest lectures at Claremont Men’s College and then at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, until his death in 1973.
Themes in Strauss’s Thought
What matters most about Leo Strauss’s life is not primarily his deeds but his thoughts. There are two basic ways we could approach Strauss’s importance
