Leo Strauss: life, ideas and books

Life

Leo Strauss was born in Kirchhain, Germany, in 1899. He studied at Marburg and took his doctorate at the University of Hamburg in 1921 under Ernst Cassirer, and he also attended courses by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. After leaving Germany he held a Rockefeller fellowship, taught briefly at Cambridge and, from 1938 to 1948, taught at the New School for Social Research in New York.

From 1949 to 1969 he was professor of political science at the University of Chicago. He later taught at Claremont McKenna College and, from 1970 until his death in 1973, at St. John's College in Annapolis.

Ideas

Strauss argued that modern political thought, starting with Machiavelli, had turned away from the classical question of the best regime and the good life, and that this turn led toward relativism, historicism and, in the worst cases, nihilism. He criticised positivist social science and its sharp split between facts and values.

His remedy was a careful return to Plato, Aristotle and to medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophers such as Maimonides and Al-Farabi. He held that earlier philosophers, writing under the threat of persecution, often conveyed their teachings between the lines, so that serious reading requires attention to what authors leave unsaid. He emphasised the permanent tension between philosophy and the city, and between reason and revelation, and he coined the phrase reductio ad Hitlerum in 1953.

Major works

• On Tyranny (1948).
• Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952).
• Natural Right and History (1953).
• Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958).
• The City and Man (1964).

Why conservatives read him

Strauss was a teacher more than a movement leader, and his main influence ran through students and readers. Allan Bloom and Harry Jaffa were among those he taught, and from them a school of thought spread into American universities, think tanks and government service. Natural Right and History gave many conservatives an intellectual case that natural right is a serious option and that the founding rested on principles that are accessible to reason.

His legacy is disputed. Some commentators, especially after 2003, portrayed his followers as a secret cabal behind American foreign policy, a picture that his defenders and most scholars regard as exaggerated. Within the right he is also contested, since his students split between East Coast and West Coast schools in their reading of America, with the West Coast school following Jaffa in making Abraham Lincoln and the Declaration of Independence central. Strauss is best approached as a demanding teacher of how to read old books, whose arguments have shaped conservative thought in ways that continue to be argued over.