Leo Strauss

Leo Strauss (1899-1973) was a German-American political philosopher and historian of philosophy whose work shaped political theory in the United States during the twentieth century. Trained in the German philosophy of his youth, he spent much of his career recovering the political thought of ancient Greece and of medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophy, convinced that modernity had broken decisively with that inheritance.

Born into a Jewish family of merchants in a small German town, he studied at Marburg and Hamburg, where he earned his doctorate in 1921 under Ernst Cassirer with a thesis on Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. In Freiburg he attended lectures by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, whom he regarded as the most important thinker of his age, although he later distanced himself from some of Heidegger's positions. From 1932 he spent time in Paris, where he worked on medieval Arab and Jewish philosophers and formed a lasting friendship with Alexandre Kojève. Fleeing Nazi persecution, he passed through England before settling in the United States. He taught at the New School for Social Research in New York and, from 1949 to 1969, at the University of Chicago, where he trained several generations of students.

His thought turns on a few central ideas. The first is his rejection of historicism, the view that doctrines can be explained entirely by their social setting. Strauss thought this view undermines itself and blocks a real conversation with past authors, who must be read in good faith, allowing that they may be right. The second is esoteric writing: under pressure from censors, writers such as Machiavelli, Spinoza and Maimonides, he argued, concealed their most daring views beneath a conventional surface, speaking to general readers and to attentive ones who could understand them differently. The third is his diagnosis of modernity, which he traced back to Machiavelli as a sharp break with classical thought, with consequences such as relativism and a social science built on a fact-value distinction he found questionable.

Strauss also held that politics and philosophy are intertwined yet have irreconcilable aims. He considered the trial and death of Socrates the moment political philosophy was born.

His influence has been wide. Former students held posts in American academic and public life, and his ideas remain debated in political theory, classical studies and religious thought, drawing both devoted admirers and sharp critics. His best-known book, Natural Right and History, traces the idea of natural right from Plato to Rousseau and Burke.