Leo Strauss

In 1899Ð'-1973, American philosopher, b. Hesse, Germany. Strauss fled the Nazis and came to the United States, where he taught at the Univ. of Chicago (1949Ð'-68). Strauss is known for his controversial interpretations of political philosophers, including Xenophon and Plato. Strauss wrote an influential critique of modern political philosophy, i.e., philosophy since Machiavelli, arguing that it suffers from an inability to make value judgments about political regimes, even about obviously odious ones. As a model for how political philosophy should proceed, Strauss held up the work of the Ancients, i.e., Xenephon and Plato. He defended the ant historicist position that it is possible for a person to grasp the thought of philosophers of different eras on their own terms. Strauss then wrote a book Natural Right and History (1952), Thoughts on Machiavelli. This Strauss, like his namesake Levi, was a German-Jewish emigre who brought to his adopted country tools and techniques to tailor the frayed fabrics of American garb. The vestments with which Leo Strauss (1899-1973) was concerned, however, were intellectual rather than mall-type paraphernalia. Specifically, he may have been this century's most profound critic of the adornments of modernity. There is, he argued, a fatal flaw concealed in the rationalistic optimism of the Enlightenment project, and its ramifications have been made manifest by the twin scourges of National Socialism and Leninism. Diagnosis of the malady was his life's work - diagnosis and intimations concerning appropriate therapy. But although politics was Strauss's passion, his pursuit of the political was indirect and abstruse. He had no time for party pronouncements or the policy scuffles of the day. Rather, his method was to offer exceedingly close readings of classic philosophical and theological texts and to attempt to elicit from them the political prerequisites necessary for human beings to live well together.Strauss is best known - indeed, notorious in various academic circles - for claiming that the great philosophers of antiquity and the medieval world wrote in a sort of code so as to disguise their real meaning. They did so, he argued, for two reasons. First, they might thereby hope to escape persecution for views deemed harmful or heretical by those possessing a power to impose penalties (think of Socrates' cup of hemlock). Second and more fundamental, these evasive prose maneuvers were designed