Leo Strauss

Leo Strauss

Our understanding of the thought of the past is liable to be the more adequate, the less the historian is convinced of the superiority of his own point of view, or the more he is prepared to admit the possibility that he may have to learn something, not merely about the thinkers of the past, but from them.

The problem inherent in the surface of things, and only in the surface of things, is the heart of things.

Leo Strauss (September 20, 1899 – October 18, 1973) was a German-born American philosopher who specialized in the study of classical political philosophy.

Quotes

• All political action aims at either preservation or change. When desiring to preserve, we wish to prevent a change for the worse; when desiring to change, we wish to bring about something better. All political action is then guided by some thought of better or worse.
  • "What Is Political Philosophy" in The Journal of Politics, 19(3) (Aug. 1957) by the Southern Political Science Association, p. 343

• The kingdom is Yours, and You will reign in glory for all eternity. As it is written in Your Torah: "The Lord shall reign for ever and ever." And it is said: " And the Lord shall be King over all the earth: on that day the Lord shall be One, and His name One."
  No nobler dream was ever dreamt. It is surely nobler to be a victim of the most noble dream than to profit from a sordid reality and to wallow in it. Dream is akin to aspiration. And aspiration is a kind of divination of an enigmatic vision. And an enigmatic vision in the emphatic sense is the perception of the ultimate mystery, of the truth of the ultimate mystery. The truth of the ultimate mystery — the truth that there is an ultimate mystery, that being is radically mysterious — cannot be denied even by the unbelieving Jew of our age. That unbelieving Jew of our age, if he has any education, is ordinarily a positivist, a believer in Science, if not a positivist without any education.
  • Commenting upon the Aleinu prayer, in "Why We Remain Jews" (1962)

• Science, as the positivist understands it, is susceptible of infinite progress. That you learn in every elementary school today, I believe. Every result of science is provisional and subject to future revision, and this will never change. In other words, fifty thousand years from now there will still be results entirely different from those now, but still subject to revision. Science is susceptible of infinite progress. But how can science be susceptible of infinite progress if its object does not have an inner infinity? The belief admitted by all believers in science today — that science is by its nature essentially progressive, and eternally progressive — implies, without saying it, that being is mysterious. And here is the point where the two lines I have tried to trace do not meet exactly, but where they come within hailing distance. And, I believe, to expect more in a general way, of people in general, would be unreasonable.
  • "Why We Remain Jews" (1962)

• No bloody or unbloody change of society can eradicate the evil in man: as long as there will be men, there will be malice, envy and hatred, and hence there cannot be a society which does not have to employ coercive restraint.
  • The City and Man, p. 5 (1964)

• The emancipation of the scholars and scientists from philosophy is according to [Nietzsche] only a part of the democratic movement, i.e. of the emancipation of the low from subordination to the high. … The plebeian character of the contemporary scholar or scientist is due to the fact that he has no reverence for himself.
  • "Note on the Plan of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil", Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy 3, nos. 2 and 3 (1973)

• We are confronted with the incompatible claims of Jerusalem and Athens to our allegiance. We are open to both and willing to listen to each. We ourselves are not wise but we wish to become wise. We are seekers for wisdom, philo-sophoi.
  • Athens and Jerusalem : Some Preliminary Reflections in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (1985), p. 149

• The Jewish people and their fate are the living witness for the absence of redemption. This, one could say, is the meaning of the chosen people; the Jews are chosen to prove the absence of redemption.
  • Jewish Philosophy and the crisis of Modernity : Essays And Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought, p. 327 (1997)

Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952)

Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1952. Reissued Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. ISBN 978-0-226-77711-5

Introduction

• The purpose of Plato, or of Aristotle, as Fārābī conceived of it, is sufficiently revealed in this seemingly conventional praise of philosophy.

• Society did not recognize philosophy or the right of philosophizing. There was no harmony between philosophy and society. The philosophers were very far from being exponents of society or of parties. They defended the interests of philosophy and of nothing else. In doing this, they believed indeed that they were defending the highest interests of mankind. The exoteric teaching was needed for protecting philosophy. It was the armor in which philosophy had to appear. It was needed for political reasons. It was the form in which philosophy became visible to the political community. It was the political aspect of philosophy. It was "political" philosophy.

Persecution and the Art of Writing

• Persecution, then, gives rise to a peculiar technique of writing, and therewith to a peculiar type of literature, in which the truth about all crucial things is presented exclusively between the lines. That literature is addressed, not to all readers, but to trustworthy and intelligent readers only.
  • p. 25

• Writings are naturally accessible to all who can read. Therefore a philosopher who chose the second way could expound only such opinions as were suitable for the nonphilosophic majority: all of his writings would have to be, strictly speaking, exoteric. These opinions would not be in all respects consonant with truth. Being a philosopher, that is, hating "the lie in the soul" more than anything else, he would not deceive himself about the fact that such opinions are merely "likely tales," or "noble lies," or "probable opinions," and would leave it to his philosophic readers to disentangle the truth from its poetic or dialectic presentation. But he would defeat his purpose if he indicated clearly which of his statements expressed a noble lie, and which the still more noble truth.
  • p. 35

• An exoteric book contains then two teachings: a popular teaching of an edifying character, which is in the foreground; and a philosophic teaching concerning the most important subject, which is indicated only between the lines.
  • p. 36

• The works of the great writers of the past are very beautiful even from without. And yet their visible beauty is sheer ugliness, compared with the beauty of those hidden treasures which disclose themselves only after very long, never easy, but always pleasant work. This always difficult but always pleasant work is, I believe, what the philosophers had in mind when they recommended education. Education, they felt, is the only answer to the always pressing question, to the political question par excellence, of how to reconcile order which is not oppression with freedom which is not license.
  • p. 37

How to Study Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise

• It is a general observation that people write as they read. As a rule, careful writers are careful readers and vice versa. A careful writer wants to be read carefully. He cannot know what it means to be read carefully but by having done careful reading himself. Reading precedes writing. We read before we write. We learn to write by reading. A man learns to write well by reading well good books, by reading most carefully books which are most carefully written.
  • p. 144

Natural Right and History (1953)

• According to our social science, we can be or become wise in all matters of secondary importance, but we have to be resigned to utter ignorance in the most important respect: we cannot have any knowledge regarding the ultimate principles of our choices, i.e. regarding their soundness or unsoundness... We are then in the position of beings who are sane and sober when engaged in trivial business and who gamble like madmen when confronted with serious issues.
  • p. 4

• Liberal relativism has its roots in the natural right tradition of tolerance or in the notion that everyone has a natural right to the pursuit of happiness as he understands happiness; but in itself it is a seminary of intolerance.
  • p. 6

• Once we realize that the principles of our actions have no other support than our blind choice, we really do not believe in them anymore... In order to live, we have to silence the easily silenced voice of reason, which tells us that our principles are in themselves as good or as bad an any other principles. The more we cultivate reason, the more we cultivate nihilism...
  • p. 6

• Even by proving that a certain view is indispensable for living well, one proves merely that the view in question is a salutary myth: one does not prove it to be true.
  • p. 6

• Philosophizing means, then, to ascend from public dogma to essentially private knowledge.
  • p. 12

• History teaches us that a given view has been abandoned in favor of another by all men, or by all competent men, or perhaps by only the most vocal men; it does not teach us whether the change was sound or whether the rejected view deserved to be rejected. Only an impartial analysis of the view in question—an analysis that is not dazzled by the victory or stunned by the defeat of the adherents of the view concerned—could teach us anything regarding the worth of the view and hence regarding the meaning of the historical change.
  • p. 19

• To avert the danger [posed by theory] to life, Nietzsche could choose one of two ways: he could insist on the strictly esoteric character of the theoretical analysis of life—that is, restore the Platonic notion of the noble delusion—or else he could deny the possibility of theory proper and so conceive of thought as essentially subservient to, or dependent on, life or fate... If not Nietzsche himself, at any rate his successors [Heidegger] adopted the second alternative.
  • p. 26

• It is of the essence of traditions that they cover or conceal their humble foundations by erecting impressive edifices on them.
  • p. 31

• Nothing ought to be said or done which could create the impression that unbiased reconsideration of the most elementary premises of philosophy is a merely academic or historical affair.
  • p. 31

• By realizing that we are ignorant of the most important things, we realize at the same time that the most important thing for us, or the one thing needful, is quest for knowledge of the most important things or quest for wisdom.
  • p. 36

• It is true that the successful quest for wisdom might lead to the result that wisdom is not the one thing needful. But this result would owe its relevance to the fact that it is the result of the quest for wisdom: the very disavowal of reason must be reasonable disavowal.
  • p. 36

• In following this movement towards its end we shall inevitably reach a point beyond which the scene is darkened by the shadow of Hitler. Unfortunately, it does not go without saying that in our examination we must avoid the fallacy that in the last decades has frequently been used as a substitute for the reductio ad absurdum: the reductio ad Hitlerum. A view is not refuted by the fact that it happens to have been shared by Hitler.
  • p. 42

• Philosophy has to grant that revelation is possible. But to grant that revelation is possible means to grant that philosophy is perhaps something infinitely unimportant. To grant that revelation is possible means to grant that the philosophic life is not necessarily, not evidently, the right life. Philosophy, the life devoted to the quest for evident knowledge available to man as man, would itself rest on an unevident, arbitrary, or blind decision. This would merely confirm the thesis of faith, that there is no possibility of consistency, of a consistent and thoroughly sincere life, without belief in revelation. The mere fact that philosophy and revelation cannot refute each other would constitute the refutation of philosophy by revelation.
  • p. 75

• Men must always have distinguished (e.g. in judicial matters) between hearsay and seeing with one’s own eyes and have preferred what one has seen to what he has merely heard from others. But the use of this distinction was originally limited to particular or subordinate matters. As regards the most weighty matters—the first things and the right way—the only source of knowledge was hearsay.
  • p. 86

• The sophist, in contradistinction to the philosopher, is not set in motion and kept in motion by the sting of the awareness of the fundamental difference between conviction or belief and genuine insight.
  • p. 116

• [The sophist] is concerned with wisdom, not for its own sake, not because he hates the lie in the soul more than anything else, but for the sake of the honor or the prestige that attends wisdom.
  • p. 116

• The character, or tone, of a society depends on what the society regards as the most respectable or most worthy of admiration. But by regarding certain habits or attitudes as most respectable, a society admits the superiority, the superior dignity, of those human beings who most perfectly embody the habits or attitudes in question. That is to say, every society regards a specific human type (or a specific mixture of human types) as authoritative. When the authoritative type is the common man, everything has to justify itself before the tribunal of the common man; everything which cannot be justified before that tribunal becomes, at best, merely tolerated, if not despised or suspect. And even those who do not recognize that tribunal are, willy-nilly, molded by its verdicts.
  • p. 137

Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958)

The silence of a wise man is always meaningful.

• We shall not shock anyone, we shall merely expose ourselves to good-natured or at any rate harmless ridicule, if we profess ourselves inclined to the old­ fashioned and simple opinion according to which Machiavelli was a teacher of evil.
  • Introduction

• The problem inherent in the surface of things, and only in the surface of things, is the heart of things.
  • p. 13

• The silence of a wise man is always meaningful.
  • p. 30

• The most superficial fact regarding the Discourses, the fact that the number of its chapters equals the number of books of Livy's History, compelled us to start a chain of tentative reasoning which brings us suddenly face to face with the only New Testament quotation that ever appears in Machiavelli's two books and with an enormous blasphemy.
  • p. 49

• We believe that failing to call a spade a spade is not scientific.
  • p. 50

What is Political Philosophy (1959)

• The belief that value judgments are not subject, in the last analysis, to rational control, encourages the inclination to make irresponsible assertions regarding right and wrong or good and bad. One evades discussion of serious issues by the simple device of passing them off as value problems, whereas, to say the least, many of these conflicts arose out of man’s very agreement regarding values.
  • p. 23

• Men are constantly attracted and deluded by two opposite charms: the charm of competence which is engendered by mathematics and everything akin to mathematics, and the charm of humble awe, which is engendered by meditation on the human soul and its experiences. Philosophy is characterized by the gentle, if firm, refusal to succumb to either charm. It is the highest form of the mating of courage and moderation. In spite of its highness or nobility, it could appear as Sisyphean or ugly, when one contrasts its achievement with its goal. Yet it is necessarily accompanied, sustained and elevated by eros. It is graced by nature's grace.
  • p. 40

• Our understanding of the thought of the past is liable to be the more adequate, the less the historian is convinced of the superiority of his own point of view, or the more he is prepared to admit the possibility that he may have to learn something, not merely about the thinkers of the past, but from them.
  • p. 68

• “Our ideas” are only partly our ideas. Most of our ideas are abbreviations or residues of the thought of other people, of our teachers (in the broadest sense of the term) and of our teachers’ teachers; they are abbreviations and residues of the thought of the past. These thoughts were once explicit and in the center of consideration and discussion. It may even be presumed that they were once perfectly lucid. By being transmitted to later generations they have possibly been transformed, and there is no certainty that the transformation was effected consciously and with full clarity. … This means that the clarification of our political ideas insensibly changes into and becomes indistinguishable from the history of political ideas.
  • p. 73

• The clarification of our political ideas insensibly changes into and becomes indistinguishable from the history of political ideas.
  • p. 73

• When speaking of a “body of knowledge” or of “the results of research,” e.g., we tacitly assign the same cognitive status to inherited knowledge and to independently acquired knowledge. To counteract this tendency a special effort is required to transform inherited knowledge into genuine knowledge by revitalizing its original discovery, and to discriminate between the genuine and the spurious elements of what claims to be inherited knowledge.
  • p. 77

• The adjective “political” in “political philosophy” designates not so much the subject matter as a manner of treatment; from this point of view, I say, “political philosophy” means primarily not the philosophic study of politics, but the political, or popular, treatment of philosophy, or the political introduction to philosophy—the attempt to lead qualified citizens, or rather their qualified sons, from the political life to the philosophic life.
  • p. 93

• [The philosopher] is ultimately compelled to transcend not merely the dimensions of common opinion, of political opinion, but the dimension of political life as such; for he is left to realize that the ultimate aim of political life cannot be reached by political life, but only by a life devoted to contemplation, to philosophy.
  • p. 91

Spinoza's Critique of Religion (1965)

• It was not the "God-intoxicated" philosopher but the hard-headed, not to say hard-hearted, pupil of Machiavelli and philologic-historical critic of the Bible. Orthodoxy could be returned to only if Spinoza was wrong in every respect.
  • Preface

• There were two reasons why contemporary Jews were inclined to celebrate Spinoza. The first is Spinoza's assumed merit about mankind and only secondarily about the Jews; the second is his assumed merit about the Jewish people and only secondarily about mankind. Both reasons had induced contemporary Jews not only informally to rescind the excommunication which the Jewish community in Amsterdam had pronounced against Spinoza, but even, as Cohen put it, to canonize him.
  • Preface

• The philosophy of Kant's great successors was consciously a synthesis of Spinoza's and Kant's philosophies. Spinoza's characteristic contribution to this synthesis was a novel conception of God. He thus showed the way toward a new religion or religiousness which was to inspire a wholly new kind of society, a new kind of Church.
  • Preface

• In our time scholars generally study the Bible in the manner in which they study any other book. As is generally admitted, Spinoza more than any other man laid the foundation for this kind of Biblical study.
  • Introduction

Liberalism: Ancient and Modern (1968)

• “Culture” means … the cultivation of the mind, the taking care and improving of the native faculties of the mind in accordance with the nature of the mind. Just as the soil needs cultivators of the soil, the mind needs teachers. But teachers are not as easy to come by as farmers. The teachers themselves are pupils and must be pupils. But there cannot be an infinite regress: ultimately there must be teachers who are not in turn pupils. Those teachers who are not in turn pupils are the great minds.
  • “What is liberal education,” p. 3

• It was once said that democracy is the regime that stands or falls by virtue: a democracy is a regime in which all or most adults are men of virtue, and since virtue seems to require wisdom, a regime in which all or most adults are virtuous and wise, or the society in which all or most adults have developed their reason to a high degree, or the rational society. Democracy, in a word, is meant to be an aristocracy which has broadened into a universal aristocracy. … There exists a whole science—the science which I among thousands of others profess to teach, political science—which so to speak has no other theme than the contrast between the original conception of democracy, or what one may call the ideal of democracy, and democracy as it is. … Liberal education is the ladder by which we try to ascend from mass democracy to democracy as originally meant.
  • “What is liberal education,” pp. 4-5

• A mass culture is a culture which can be appropriated by the meanest capacities without any intellectual or moral effort whatsoever. … Liberal education is the counterpoison to mass culture, to the corroding effects of mass culture, to its inherent tendency to produce nothing but “specialists without spirit or vision and voluptuaries without heart.”
  • “What is liberal education,” p. 5
    • The phrase “specialists without spirit or vision and voluptuaries without heart.” is from Max Weber.

• Liberal education is the necessary endeavor to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society.
  • “What is liberal education,” p. 5

• Liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracy who have ears to hear, of human greatness.
  • “What is liberal education,” p. 5

• Life is too short to live with any but the greatest books.
  • “What is liberal education,” p. 6

• Education to perfect gentlemanship, to human excellence, liberal education consists in reminding oneself of human excellence, of human greatness.
  • “What is liberal education,” p. 6

• It is as absurd to expect members of philosophy departments to be philosophers as it is to expect members of art departments to be artists.
  • “What is liberal education,” p. 7

• We somehow believe that our point of view is superior, higher than those of the greatest minds—either because our point of view is that of our time, and our time, being later than the time of the greatest minds, can be presumed to be superior to their times; or else because we believe that each the greatest minds was right from his point of view, but not, as he claims, simply right.
  • “What is liberal education,” pp. 7-8

• The facile delusions which conceal from us our true situation all amount to this: that we are, or can be, wiser than the wisest men of the past. We are thus induced to play the part, not of attentive and docile listeners, but of impresarios and lion-tamers.
  • “What is liberal education,” p.

• We cannot exert our understanding without from time to time understanding something of importance; and this act of understanding may be accompanied by the awareness of our understanding, by the understanding of understanding, by noesis noesos, and this is so high, so pure, so noble an experience that Aristotle could ascribe it to his God.
  • “What is liberal education,” p. 8

• By becoming aware of the dignity of the mind, we realize the true ground of the dignity of man and therewith the goodness of the world, whither we understand it as created or uncreated, which is the home of man because it is the home of the human mind.
  • “What is liberal education,” p. 8

• Liberal education, which consists in the constant intercourse with the greatest minds, is a training in the highest form of modesty. … It is at the same time a training in boldness. … It demands from us the boldness implied in the resolve to regard the accepted views as mere opinions, or to regard the average opinions as extreme opinions which are at least as likely to be wrong as the most strange or least popular opinions
  • “What is liberal education,” p. 8

• Liberal education is liberation from vulgarity. The Greeks had a beautiful word for “vulgarity”; they called it apeirokalia, lack of experience in things beautiful. Liberal education supplies us with experience in things beautiful.
  • “What is liberal education,” p. 8

• It is safer to try to understand the low in the light of the high than the high in the light of the low. In doing the latter one necessarily distorts the high, whereas in doing the former one does not deprive the low of the freedom to reveal itself as fully as what it is.
  • p. 225

• Only a great fool would call the new political science diabolic: it has no attributes peculiar to fallen angels. It is not even Machiavellian, for Machiavelli's teaching was graceful, subtle, and colorful. Nor is it Neronian. Nevertheless one may say of it that it fiddles while Rome burns. It is excused by two facts: it does not know that it fiddles, and it does not know that Rome burns.
  • p. 223

Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy (1971)

"Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy", Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy '2(1) (Summer 1971)

• Political philosophy has lost its credibility in proportion as politics itself has become more philosophic than ever in a sense.

• Political philosophy was concerned with the best or just order of society which is by nature best or just everywhere or always, while politics is concerned with the being and well-being of this or that particular society (a polis, a nation, an empire) that is in being at a given place for some time.

• In order to see the relation between philosophy as rigorous science and the alternative to it clearly, one must look at the political conflict between the two antagonists, i.e. at the essential character of that conflict.

Seminar on Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil (1971–1972)

Session 1

• Nietzsche is never boring. He is always interesting, exciting, thrilling, glittering, breathtaking. He possesses a kind of brilliance and tempo which I believe was unknown in former times.

• Dogmatism as Nietzsche means it implies that one possesses the truth, or at least the most important or the most valuable truth. Yet the truth is elusive like that woman of whom he spoke at the very beginning. Elsewhere he says we are the first generation which no longer believes that it possesses the truth. That is what he means by the end of dogmatism.

"Niccolo Machiavelli" (1987)

"Niccolo Machiavelli" in Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey (ed.) History of Political Philosophy (3rd ed., 1987)

• For a philosophy based on faith is no longer philosophy. Perhaps it was this unresolved conflict which has prevented Western thought from ever coming to rest. Perhaps it is this conflict which is at the bottom of a kind of thought which is philosophic indeed but no longer Greek: modern philosophy. It is in trying to understand modern philosophy that we come across Machiavelli. Machiavelli is the only political thinker whose name has come into common use for designating a kind of politics, which exists and will continue to exist independently of his influence, a politics guided exclusively by considerations of 'expediency, which uses all means, fair or foul, iron or poison, for achieving its ends-its end being the ag­ grandizement of one's country or fatherland-but also using the father­ land in the service of the self-aggrandizement of the politician or statesman or one's party.

• Machiavelli is not concerned with how men do live merely in order to describe it; his intention is rather, on the basis of knowledge of how men do live, to teach princes how they ought to rule and even how they ought to live.

An Untitled Lecture on Plato's Euthyphron (1996)

"An Untitled Lecture on Plato's Euthyphron", Interpretation (Fall 1996)

• The Euthyphron then gives us a two-fold presentation of piety. First, a discussion of what piety is. Secondly, a presentation of the problem of Socrates' piety.

• The Euthyphron is a very paradoxical dialogue. So indeed is every Platonic dialogue.

Misattributed

• All there is to thinking is seeing something noticeable, which makes you see something you weren't noticing, which makes you see something that isn't even visible.
  • Attributed to Strauss at many sites on the internet, this is actually Norman Maclean, in A River Runs Through It (1976)

Quotes about Leo Strauss

• In 1938 Strauss moved to the United States, where after the war he occupied a chair at Chicago in the same period that Oakeshott was at the LSE. There he produced the remarkable series of works – in form, an oracular retrospect of the history of philosophy from Socrates to Nietzsche, in effect, a systematic political doctrine – which has since nurtured the most distinctive and strong-minded school of American conservatism. There were two principal themes in this oeuvre. A just political order must be grounded in immutable demands of natural right. Nature, however, is inherently unequal. The capacity to discover truth is restricted to a few, and to endure it exhibited by scarcely more. The best regime will therefore reflect differences in human excellence, and be led by an appropriate élite. But although the highest virtue is philosophical contemplation of the truth, this does not mean – contrary to a superficial reading of the Republic – that the just city will be ruled by philosophers. For philosophy gazes without faltering, not only at the necessary conditions of political order, discomfiting as these may be to demotic prejudice, but at the far more terrible realities of cosmic disorder: the absence of any divine authority, the delusion of any common morality, the transience of the earth and its species – every insight that religion must deny and society cannot survive. Unfolded at large, these truths would destroy the protective atmosphere of any civilisation and with it the conditions for the pursuit of philosophy itself. Esoteric wisdom and exoteric opinion must therefore remain distinct, on pain of mutual destruction. Leisured gentlemen instructed in rule – but not raised to truth – by philosophers should uphold a rational order of political stability against levelling temptations. Under their rule, theoretical knowledge could find institutional shelter, without dangerous side-effects on civic practice.
  • Perry Anderson, "The Intransigent Right: Michael Oakeshott, Leo Strauss, Carl Schmitt, Friedrich von Hayek" (1992)

• Leo Strauss is professor of political philosophy in Chicago, highly respected. Wrote a good book about Hobbes (as well as the one about Spinoza). Now another about natural law. He is a convinced orthodox atheist. Very odd. A truly gifted intellect. I don't like him.
  • Hannah Arendt, in letter to Karl Jaspers in 1954, published in Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Correspondence, 1926-1969 (1993)

• In my opinion, the only serious attempt to “save” Americans from cultural relativism has come from the students of Leo Strauss.
  • James R. Flynn, Where Have All the Liberals Gone? Race, Class, and Ideals in America (2008) Chapter 8. William James and Leo Strauss

• For Strauss, modern political philosophy is a reaction to ancient political philosophy, the result of a direct confrontation with political reality itself. By drawing a sharp distinction between the ancients and the moderns, he clears the way for an attack on the contemporary preference for modern political philosophy. He admits that to seek today simply to imitate classical political philosophy would be neither feasible nor desirable, since new situations call for fresh approaches to things political; but he sees a return to the premodern classics as a necessary precondition of the elaboration of a political philosophy relevant to contemporary problems.
  • Dante Germino, Machiavelli to Marx (1972), Introduction: "Modernity" in Western Political Thought

• From Moses Hess to Martin Buber and Leo Baeck, Spinoza has great symbolic significance for the articulation of German Jewish identity. Leo Strauss’s Spinoza project is representative of the prominent place of Spinoza for Jewish self-understanding in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany.
  • Willi Goetschel, Spinoza’s modernity : Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Heine (2004)

• But just how "sinister" was Leo Strauss himself? The answer depends on how a reader approaches his books. If you read Strauss with a well-disposed spirit, he can be interpreted as a genuine friend of American liberal democracy. He worked to create an elite that was strong, sober, and sufficiently free of illusions about the goodness of man to fight the totalitarian enemies of liberal democracy-be they fascists, communists, or Islamicist fundamentalists.
  But if you read Strauss with a skeptical mind, the way he himself read the great philosophers, a more disturbing picture takes shape. Strauss, by this view, emerges as a disguised Machiavelli, a cynical teacher who encouraged his followers to believe that their intellectual superiority entitles them to rule over the bulk of humanity by means of duplicity. The worst thing you can do to Leo Strauss, perhaps, is to read his books with Straussian eyes.
  • Jeet Heer, "The philosopher", The Boston Globe (May 11, 2003)

• For Strauss, every philosopher at all times is in the situation of political persecution, and hence has to construct a specific way of writing, which on its surface is “exoteric,” that is, meant for the general, unsophisticated reader, yet is “esoteric” in its hidden message, accessible only to few “thoughtful” and “careful” readers capable of understanding the true message of and behind a text by “reading between the lines”. True philosophers, then, including Plato, “must conceal their opinions from all but philosophers, either by limiting themselves to oral instruction of a carefully selected group of pupils, or by writing about the most important subject by means of ‘brief indication’”.
  • Dmitri Nikulin, "Plato: Testimonia et Fragmenta" in The other Plato : the Tübingen interpretation of Plato’s inner-academic teachings edited by Dmitri Nikulin

• Today there are academic dogmas as well, such as those of the cultural Left, the Austrian school of economics, and the followers of Leo Strauss. Intellectuals, moreover, often flock together; in fact very few of them are truly untamable individualists in the tradition of Socrates, Thoreau, Nietzsche, Camus, and Orwell.
  • Richard A. Posner, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline (2001), Chapter 1. Setting the Stage

• To understand nature, human nature, and the imperatives of social life, it was essential to throw out this meaningless rubbish and begin on scientific foundations. No account that sees Hobbes as other than a secular, materialistic utilitarian is an account of Hobbes at all, which is why Leo Strauss’s attempt to present Hobbes’s science as a mere tarting-up of old-fashioned conceptions of the state as a remedy for sin just misses the point.
  • Alan Ryan, The Making of Modern Liberalism (2012) Chapter 11. The Nature of Human Nature in Hobbes and Rousseau

• But is the latter possibility to be dismissed out of hand? An interesting alternative is available to those readers who agree with Waterfield that the Republic has little to offer as a work of political philosophy, but who at the same time find the ethical reading – especially in Waterfield’s extreme formulation – ultimately unconvincing. The thesis is most closely associated with the twentieth-century American philosopher Leo Strauss, though it has been pursued by a number of others, most prominently Allan Bloom. In essence, it agrees that the Republic is a dialogue in which an authoritarian system of government is outlined, but contends that [Plato]’s purpose in doing so is ironic: the aim is to highlight the preposterousness of the just city.
  • D. J. Sheppard, Plato's Republic: An Edinburgh Philosophical Guide (2009)

• Nor did equality fare well as an ideal in the aftermath of the French Revolution. One twentieth-century writer, the Israeli historian Jacob Talmon, blamed the egalitarian thrust of the Revolution, and especially the ideas of Rousseau, for the totalitarian dictatorships of his time, while other thinkers who experienced those dictatorships at first hand, including Leo Strauss and the right-wing German philosopher Carl Schmitt, found it easier to defend secrecy, elitism, and dictatorship than to endorse anything resembling egalitarian principles.
  • Alan Wolfe, The Future of Liberalism, Chapter 3. Equality’s Inevitability

External links

• The Leo Strauss Center
  • Audio of Leo Strauss lecture on Plato's 'Meno'
• Audio of 1958 lecture by Leo Strauss on Genesis