What ought to take primacy when carrying out research and interpreting seminal books: the text itself, or the context? A known critic of historicism and contextualism, Leo Strauss published his seminal essay, ‘What is Political Philosophy?’ in 1957 in the Journal of Politics and introduced a problem with the field: Modern academic obsessions over [...]
Historical context, for members of the Straussian school, is “historicism,” a form of moral relativism that believes that there are no fixed truths, only ideas appropriate for their historical moment… Patriotism Is Not Enough: Harry Jaffa, Walter Berns, and the Arguments That Redefined American Conservatism by Steven Hayward (263 pages, Encounter Books, 2016) Dr. Steven [...]
The nexus between the Straussians and neoconservatives has been overstated for partisan ends, but it is still nonetheless there. Sociologically and culturally, the two movements are largely indistinguishable… The Truth About Leo Strauss by Catherine and Michael Zuckert (University of Chicago Press, 2006). In The Truth About Leo Strauss, Catherine and Michael Zuckert, both professors [...]
Leo Strauss and the American Right has little to do with Leo Strauss and everything to do with liberal fear of attempts to reintroduce standards of religious morality to public conduct… Leo Strauss and the American Right by Shadia B. Drury (St. Martin ’s Press, 1997) Shadia Drury’s first book, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (1988), [...]
Even if one disagrees with the authors of Selfish Libertarians and Social Conservatives, they have provided a scholarly model for how the media and academia should act: in calmness, in restraint, but also with open vigor and manliness… Selfish Libertarians and Socialist Conservatives?: The Foundations of the Libertarian-Conservative Debate by Nikolai Wenzel and Nate Schlueter [...]
Government remains limited in civil society because God gave man the ability, through work and reason, to subdue the earth and thereby improve his life by the use of private property... Understanding Locke John Locke is one of the few major philosophers who can be used to provide a theoretical and moral foundation for American [...]
Whether or not President Trump is successful with a principled nationalistic agenda or with a more pragmatic one, more traditionally-oriented conservative intellectuals must do some serious thinking, either acceding to nationalism or pragmatism or finding a new story… Donald Trump is nothing if he is not forthright. In his Inaugural Address, the President could [...]
Leo Strauss (1899-1973) was a native of Germany. "I was," he reported near the end of his life, "brought up in a conservative, even orthodox Jewish home somewhere in a rural district of Germany."[1] Strauss received his doctorate from Hamburg University in 1921. In 1938, he emigrated to the United States and commenced teaching political [...]
Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin were scholars in the field of political philosophy, yet they did not have an explicit political teaching. They studied the great political philosophers of the past in order to learn lessons that might become living truths for us today. But Strauss and Voegelin did not write political treatises defending a [...]
Leo Strauss: Man of Peace by Robert Howse, (Cambridge University Press, 200 pages) The LORD is a man of war: the LORD is his name. —Exodus 15:3 There is an old story that the Archangel Michael and the devil feuded over Moses’ remains. While Michael aimed to convey the prophet’s body up to heaven, Satan [...]
Liberal education, which consists in the constant intercourse with the greatest minds, is a training in the highest form of modesty, not to say of humility. It is at the same time a training in boldness: It demands from us the complete break with the noise, the rush, the thoughtlessness, the cheapness of the [...]
One difference between postmodern conservatives and other contributors to First Thoughts has to do with being influenced by Leo Strauss. Each pomoncon can speak for himself (or herself). But I would say that we all regard that influence as making us better and especially more astute thinkers and readers of first-rate books than we would otherwise be. [...]
Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America, Paul Gottfried, Cambridge University Press (2011) When writing about the work of an academic historian or philosopher—as opposed to a polemicist, a politician, or a popularizer—there is an obvious threshold question with which to begin: Is the writer’s work intrinsically interesting or compelling in some way? [...]
Eric Voegelin For more than fifty years, American conservatives have treated Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss as fellow travellers. But for various reasons, that relationship and its contemporary legacy has been fraught with problems. What, then, are the points of continuity and discontinuity between the American conservative movement and these two political [...]