Volume 32, Number 9 · May 30, 1985
Sphinx Without a Secret
By M.F. Burnyeat
Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy
by Leo Strauss, with an introduction by Thomas L. Pangle
University of Chicago Press, 260 pp., $8.95 (paper)
This extraordinary sentence was written not by Leo Strauss but to introduce a book honoring him. It perfectly expresses the substance, and the style, of his teaching. Accordingly, it does not explain to outsiders what that teaching is, or by what powers the teaching has raised Strauss to his present eminence as a guru of American conservatism. For initiates of his ideas, on the other hand, those who are in touch with 'the considerate few,' the sentence will be like poetry in the way it condenses into one pregnant utterance the entire thought-world of the master.
Review, 5617 words
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