Volume 51, Number 17 · November 4, 2004
The Closing of the Straussian Mind
By Mark Lilla
The Modern Prince: What Leaders Need to Know Now
by Carnes Lord
Yale University Press, 275 pp., $26.00
Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire
by Anne Norton
Yale University Press, 236 pp., $25.00
In a previous article I discussed a number of new European studies of the thought of Leo Strauss, the German-Jewish thinker who spent the second half of his life teaching and writing in the United States.[1] Those studies reveal a very 'European' Strauss, concerned with Zionism and the Jewish question, the legitimacy of the modern Enlightenment, the rival claims of philosophy and revelation, and most fundamentally the possibility of restoring the Socratic practice of philosophy as a way of life. This Strauss is very little known or understood among the wider public. Instead, his name has been associated in recent decades almost exclusively with the activities of his American disciples, many of whom are deeply involved with Republican and neoconservative politics. This has led to wild speculation about Straussian influence in American government, even the suggestion that Strauss's 'esoteric' method of reading texts might lie behind a duplicitous foreign policy, especially in the recent Iraq war.
Review, 5603 words
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