Leo Strauss

Leo Strauss (1899–1973) was a German-Jewish political philosopher who, after fleeing Nazi Germany, taught at the New School for Social Research and from 1949 at the University of Chicago, where he developed the most consequential post-war reading of the history of political thought. His central thesis was that modern political philosophy, beginning with Machiavelli and culminating in Nietzsche and Heidegger, had abandoned the classical understanding of natural right and replaced it with historicism and value relativism — a shift Strauss treated as the philosophical precondition for both the legitimation crisis of liberal democracy and the rise of twentieth-century tyranny.

Strauss did not write as a partisan of any modern political programme. His influence on conservatism was indirect: through his students and their students, who carried into American politics a habit of taking founding-era texts seriously as philosophical arguments rather than as period documents.

Key Takeaways

• German-American political philosopher whose recovery of classical political philosophy reframed twentieth-century debates about modernity, natural right, and liberal democracy.
• Argued that the modern rejection of nature as a moral standard (“the three waves of modernity”) produced the philosophical crisis from which both relativism and totalitarianism emerged.
• Founder of the so-called Straussian school, whose graduates exerted disproportionate influence on American conservative political thought, particularly the Claremont and East Coast variants.

History And Context

Strauss was born in Kirchhain, Hesse, into an Orthodox Jewish family, took his doctorate at Hamburg under Ernst Cassirer in 1921, and worked at the Akademie für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin until the Nazi accession. After research years in Paris and London he settled in the United States in 1937. The 1949 move to Chicago made him the centre of an American school of political philosophy that would eventually number Allan Bloom, Harvey Mansfield, Harry Jaffa, Walter Berns, and Stanley Rosen among its first generation, and many more in the second.

The intellectual setting matters. American social science in the 1950s was in its behaviourist and positivist phase, treating political life as a domain of preferences and votes amenable to value-neutral measurement. Strauss attacked the underlying assumption directly: a political science that cannot evaluate regimes is, he argued, complicit in whatever regime it happens to find. Natural Right and History (1953) made the case in a sustained reading of the canon from Plato to Burke, with Hobbes and Locke as the pivot from classical to modern natural right and Rousseau, Burke, and Nietzsche as the successive crests of modernity’s rejection of nature.

His later writings on Maimonides, Spinoza, Xenophon, and Plato extended the project: every major figure was read on the assumption that serious philosophers had often written esoterically to protect philosophy from political authority and to protect political authority from philosophy.

The Conservative Position

Strauss’s appeal to American conservatism rests on three claims. First, that the American Founding is intelligible as a serious philosophical project, drawing on classical and modern natural right in a deliberate synthesis — not, as the Progressive historians had argued, a class-interested constitutional manoeuvre. Harry Jaffa’s Crisis of the House Divided (1959), arguing that Lincoln correctly read the Declaration as a statement of natural right against Stephen Douglas’s relativism, became the founding text of West Coast Straussianism for this reason.

Second, that the modern collapse of natural right into historicism — the position that values are products of their historical moment and cannot be evaluated across moments — is not a sophisticated discovery but a political catastrophe. Without standards above the regime, the regime cannot be judged; without the capacity to judge regimes, liberal democracy disarms itself before its enemies. The Cold War was, on this view, an ideological contest in which the West’s reigning philosophy had already conceded the philosophical ground.

Third, that the recovery of classical political philosophy is a serious intellectual programme, not nostalgia. Plato and Aristotle remain interlocutors on questions modern thought has either lost or buried — the relation of philosophy to the city, the structure of the best regime, the nature of statesmanship.

Differing Positions

Critics have always attacked the esoteric reading method as licence for projecting any view onto any text; Strauss’s defenders reply that the method is constrained by careful textual evidence and that its detractors typically have not read the underlying readings. The historian of philosophy Quentin Skinner’s contextualist school treats Straussian readings of Hobbes, Locke, and Machiavelli as anachronistic in their indifference to immediate polemical context.

Within conservatism, the East Coast Straussians (Mansfield, Bloom) and the West Coast Straussians (Jaffa, Charles Kesler) divide on whether Lockean natural rights and the Declaration’s universalism are continuous with the classical tradition or a decisive break from it. Paleoconservatives (Russell Kirk, M. E. Bradford) treated Straussianism’s Lincoln-centred universalism as alien to the Anglo-American Burkean line and as the philosophical engine of post-1990 democratic-internationalist foreign policy.

The fiercest polemical attack — Shadia Drury’s The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (1988) — read Strauss as a closeted Nietzschean teaching elite manipulation of the masses; this reading is not accepted within Straussian scholarship but circulates widely outside it.

References

1. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 9–34, 165–251.
2. Leo Strauss, “What Is Political Philosophy?”, in What Is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1959), 9–55.
3. Harry V. Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, 50th anniv. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009 [1959]), chs. 9–14.
4. Steven B. Smith, Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), introduction and ch. 1.