Liberal Education: Experience in Things Beautiful

By |2017-01-15T01:14:45-06:00October 7th, 2015|Categories: Featured, Leo Strauss, Liberal Learning, Quotation|

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 Vanity [...]

What is the Role of Leo Strauss in Conservative Thought?

By |2015-07-31T12:03:41-05:00July 23rd, 2015|Categories: Conservatism, Featured, Leo Strauss, Peter A. Lawler|Tags: |

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. So [...]

Leo Strauss: The Right’s False Prophet

By |2015-05-23T07:12:31-05:00May 22nd, 2015|Categories: Conservatism, Leo Strauss, Paul Gottfried|Tags: |

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? If [...]

Eric Voegelin, Leo Strauss, and American Conservatism

By |2018-07-10T00:41:05-05:00April 11th, 2015|Categories: Conservatism, Eric Voegelin, Featured, Leo Strauss|

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 philosophers? [...]

Remembering Jaffa and Berns

By |2016-10-30T08:08:30-05:00February 5th, 2015|Categories: Leo Strauss, Peter A. Lawler|Tags: |

Walter Berns and Harry Jaffa, two legendary teachers and scholars, died within hours of each other. What tied them together is that they were both students of Leo Strauss, and all of their writing was fundamentally indebted to “disruptive innovations” that Strauss introduced into our understanding of thought and politics. Jaffa (born in 1918) and [...]

Leo Strauss and the Right’s Civil War

By |2020-09-25T00:51:32-05:00June 13th, 2014|Categories: Conservatism, Leo Strauss|Tags: , |

I recently reviewed Paul Gottfried’s Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America for the University Bookman. Paul responds to my review here. Note that in addition to Paul’s book being available as an affordable paperback, the Kindle edition is now going for just $12.49—if you’re interested in this topic, be sure to read it [...]

Edmund Burke and Leo Strauss

By |2014-01-16T16:40:08-06:00January 9th, 2014|Categories: Edmund Burke, Leo Strauss, Peter A. Lawler|

I recently attended a conference in Claremont on Strauss and Burke–or what Strauss says about Edmund Burke to close Natural Right and History. For anyone who really checks out what he says there, it’s the strangest part of a strange book. Here are some obvious points that might turn out to be wrong: Burke is an [...]

Teaching in an Age of Ideology: Leo Strauss

By |2016-01-18T22:16:11-06:00April 3rd, 2013|Categories: Education, Ideology, Leo Strauss|Tags: |

Leo Strauss So far I have examined a set of thinkers that could be classified in the same school of thought as “Voegelinian”: Eric Voegelin, Ellis Sandoz, Gerhart Niemeyer, and John H. Hallowell. In their different styles and approaches to teaching, each of them sought to show their students the true, the beautiful, [...]

Crusades for Democracy & American Foreign Policy

By |2016-07-26T15:21:37-05:00January 28th, 2013|Categories: Claes Ryn, Foreign Affairs, Leo Strauss, Neoconservatism, Paul Gottfried, Political Philosophy|Tags: |

In recent years a heated debate has erupted about American foreign policy and about what moral purpose should inform our conduct of international relations. While analysts Robert Kagan, Michael Mandelbaum, and Stephen Schwartz insist the United States should use its power, where possible, on behalf of “democracy,” other commentators have rejected this approach. James Kurth, [...]

A NeoCon Night at the Opera

By |2014-01-21T13:34:05-06:00September 27th, 2012|Categories: Conservatism, Film, Leo Strauss, Music, Neoconservatism, Politics, Stephen Masty|

(WARNING: Contains Neo-Conservatism and saucy language) Well, here’s a big buon giorno to our National Public Radio audience, because it’s time for Impariamo Opera and I’m your co-host, Angela Tedioso. And I’m Hans-Dieter Langweilig. But today we stray from the shores of sunny Italy to the magical, musical world of Strauss. […]

Behind the Crack-up of the Right

By |2014-01-15T14:14:02-06:00June 29th, 2012|Categories: Conservatism, Leo Strauss, Pat Buchanan, Politics|

In introducing his new book, Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America, Paul Gottfried identifies a fundamental divide between neoconservatives and the traditional right. The divide is over the question: What is this nation, America? Straussians, writes Gottfried, “wish to present the construction of government as an open-ended rationalist process. All children of the [...]

Heads-Up: Gottfried on Leo Strauss

By |2017-08-03T13:41:59-05:00December 12th, 2011|Categories: Books, Conservatism, Leo Strauss, Paul Gottfried, Stephen Masty|

Leo Strauss Far from Amazon and bookshops here in Kabul, I can only suggest a good article by Paul Gottfried on his newest book and hope that someone reviews it here. Dr. Gottfried, a prolific conservative author who teaches at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, has written Leo Strauss and the American Conservative Movement: [...]

Leo Strauss: On the Side of the Angels

By |2017-06-29T16:38:55-05:00May 26th, 2011|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Conservatism, Constitution, Leo Strauss, Russell Kirk|

Leo Strauss My close friend and colleague, Mickey Craig, chair of the Department of Political Science at Hillsdale, has given me a couple of pointers as well as sources to consider regarding Russell Kirk’s relationship to Leo Strauss’s students. As frequent The Imaginative Conservative readers know, we’ve had a discussion—but only, thus far, a [...]

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