Leo Strauss

1. Introduction

Leo Strauss (1899–1973) was a German–American political theorist whose work reshaped the study of classical political philosophy and its bearing on modern liberal democracy. Best known for his claims about esoteric writing, his revival of natural right, and his dramatization of the tension between reason and revelation, Strauss became a central—though highly contested—figure in 20th‑century political thought.

Working primarily in the United States after fleeing Nazi Germany, Strauss argued that many canonical texts should be read as deliberate philosophical constructions rather than as transparent reflections of their age. He maintained that classical authors such as Plato and Aristotle pursued a substantive inquiry into the best political order, and he contrasted this with what he regarded as the relativism and historicism of much modern thought.

Strauss’s interpretations of thinkers from Maimonides and al‑Farabi to Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke influenced both scholarly debates and wider discussions about the foundations of liberalism, the crisis of modernity, and the role of religion in politics. Proponents have seen in his work a powerful defense of rational moral standards and a subtle account of the dangers facing mass democracy. Critics have associated him with ideological projects ranging from cultural conservatism to “neoconservatism,” and have questioned both his readings of past philosophers and his own political implications.

Although Strauss did not present a systematic philosophy, his lectures and writings offered a coherent orientation: a call to revive classical political philosophy, to reconsider the permanence of the conflict between philosophy and biblical revelation, and to reflect on the responsibilities and vulnerabilities of philosophy under modern conditions.

2. Life and Historical Context

Strauss’s life traced a path through the major crises of 20th‑century Europe into the academic milieu of the United States, and many interpreters relate his themes to these upheavals.

Early Life and Weimar Germany

Born in 1899 into a Jewish family of livestock merchants in Kirchhain, Hesse‑Nassau, Strauss grew up in a small-town Orthodox milieu while being educated within German high culture. His university studies in Marburg, Freiburg, and Hamburg during and after World War I placed him amid Weimar Germany’s intense philosophical debates—Neo‑Kantianism, phenomenology, and early existentialism. The collapse of the German Empire, the instability of the Weimar Republic, and the perceived failure of liberal institutions provided the political background for his later concerns about the fragility of liberal democracy.

Exile and Emigration

The rise of National Socialism and the tightening restrictions on Jews forced Strauss to leave Germany in 1932–33. He held research positions in Paris and at the University of Cambridge before emigrating to the United States in 1937, joining the New School for Social Research. Scholars often link this experience of political persecution and exile with his interest in how philosophers write under oppressive regimes and with his suspicion of optimistic narratives of progress.

American Academic Setting

From 1949 Strauss taught in the political science department at the University of Chicago, later moving to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Post‑war America, with its confidence in liberal institutions and social science, formed the context for his critique of positivism and behavioralism in political science, and for his defense of classical political philosophy as an alternative. Cold War anxieties, debates about totalitarianism, and emerging questions about secularization and civil religion provided the broader horizon for his reflections on modernity, political theology, and the “crisis” of the West.

3. Intellectual Development

Strauss’s intellectual trajectory is often divided into phases that reflect both biographical shifts and changing focal points in his scholarship.

Weimar Formation

During his university years (1917–1920s), Strauss studied under Neo‑Kantians such as Ernst Cassirer and engaged with phenomenology and Martin Heidegger’s existential analytic. His dissertation on Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi introduced him to questions of nihilism, skepticism about reason, and the challenge posed by biblical faith. Commentators often see this period as framing the enduring problem of the relation between reason and revelation.

Exile and Turn to Medieval Jewish and Islamic Thought

In the 1930s, while in Germany, France, and the UK, Strauss focused on Spinoza, Maimonides, and medieval Islamic philosophers such as al‑Farabi. Works like Spinoza’s Critique of Religion and Philosophy and Law show him reassessing Enlightenment rationalism and the attempt to resolve the “Jewish question” through emancipation and secularization. He increasingly turned to medieval thinkers as models of how philosophy might coexist in tension with religious law and political authority.

Chicago Period and Classical Political Philosophy

After settling in the United States, Strauss’s attention shifted more decisively to classical political philosophy. Through studies of Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, and later Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke, he articulated a sustained critique of modernity and historicism and advanced the thesis of a fundamental division between ancients and moderns. His Chicago seminars became a center for this approach.

Late Reflections

In his final years, Strauss revisited earlier themes in more explicitly political‑theological and civilizational terms. Lectures and essays from this period, some published posthumously, explored the “quarrel” between Athens and Jerusalem, the fate of liberal democracy, and the prospects for a recovery of classical rationalism under modern conditions. Scholars differ on whether this phase represents a deepening of his earlier positions or a more cautious, reflective restatement.

4. Major Works and Key Texts

Strauss’s writings span monographs, essay collections, and commentaries. Several texts are widely regarded as central to understanding his project.

Overview of Major Works

Thematic Clusters

1. Reason and Revelation / Jewish Thought
   Spinoza’s Critique of Religion and Philosophy and Law examine Spinoza’s challenge to biblical religion and Maimonides’ attempt to reconcile philosophy and halakhic observance. In later collections such as Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity (posthumous), these concerns are extended to modern Jewish thought and political Zionism.

2. Method and Esotericism
   Persecution and the Art of Writing advances Strauss’s thesis that many philosophers write “between the lines” under conditions of persecution, shaping their texts to conceal heterodox doctrines.

3. Natural Right and the History of Political Philosophy
   Natural Right and History and What Is Political Philosophy? set out Strauss’s critique of historicism and his defense of classical natural right. The City and Man and specific studies of Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, and Locke model his interpretive method.

4. Modernity and Machiavelli
   Thoughts on Machiavelli presents Machiavelli as inaugurating a fundamentally new, lower but allegedly more secure, conception of politics centered on power, security, and the passions rather than virtue. This reading underpins Strauss’s broader contrast between ancients and moderns.

These works together form the textual basis for subsequent debates about Strauss’s views on natural right, esotericism, and the crisis of modern liberal democracy.

5. Core Ideas: Natural Right, Historicism, and Modernity

Strauss’s central philosophical concerns coalesce around the concepts of natural right, historicism, and the character of modernity.

Natural Right

For Strauss, natural right denotes objective, knowable standards of justice grounded in human nature rather than in convention or positive law. He frequently distinguishes this from natural law by emphasizing concrete judgments about right regimes and actions rather than a comprehensive juridical code. In Natural Right and History, he interprets classical thinkers, especially Aristotle, as offering a hierarchy of regimes and ways of life that can be rationally evaluated as better or worse by nature.

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“The problem of natural right is the problem of the right or the good… that is by nature, that is independent of arbitrary human will or decision.”
— Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, Introduction

Proponents of this reading see Strauss as reviving a robust, non‑positivist moral vocabulary; critics maintain that he underplays internal tensions within classical sources and the role of historical context.

Historicism and Relativism

Strauss uses historicism to describe views that treat all moral and political ideas as products of their historical epoch, thus denying trans‑historical standards. He associates historicism with a trajectory from Hegel to Weber and contemporary social science. In his account, once natural right is rejected, societies lack rational grounds to prefer one regime over another, which he links to forms of nihilism.

Supporters argue that Strauss’s critique exposes difficulties in purely contextualist approaches to values. Detractors contend that he caricatures sophisticated historicist positions and overlooks their resources for critical judgment.

Modernity as a Philosophical Project

Strauss portrays modernity not only as a period but as a philosophical reorientation, beginning with Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke. This project, in his view, lowers the aims of politics—from virtue and the best life to peace, security, and material well‑being—while relying on science and technology. He describes a “quarrel between the ancients and the moderns,” with modern thought trading moral depth for efficacy.

An alternative interpretation suggests that Strauss is less diagnosing decadence than mapping competing rationalities of politics, and some readers emphasize the ambivalence, rather than simple condemnation, in his assessments of modern liberalism.

6. Esotericism and Method of Interpretation

Strauss’s theory of esoteric writing is among his most distinctive and controversial contributions to hermeneutics.

Persecution and the Art of Writing

In Persecution and the Art of Writing, Strauss argues that philosophers in pre‑liberal or religiously authoritarian societies often faced severe penalties for heterodox views. To survive and to communicate with a small circle of capable readers, they developed a literary technique in which the text’s exoteric surface conformed to prevailing opinion while an esoteric teaching was embedded in subtle indications—omissions, contradictions, peculiar examples, or structural features.

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“Persecution… gives rise to a peculiar technique of writing, and therewith to a peculiar type of literature, in which the surface is not identical with the depth.”
— Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, Preface

Interpretive Method

Strauss’s method involves close, often line‑by‑line reading; attention to the order of arguments, repetitions, and apparent mistakes; and an assumption that major thinkers write with deliberate care. He applies this to Plato’s dialogues, Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, al‑Farabi, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and others, frequently proposing that their “true” teaching is more skeptical, radical, or heterodox than traditional readings admit.

Debates About Esotericism

Supporters regard Strauss’s approach as historically plausible in contexts of censorship and as a corrective to naïve, literal readings of pre‑modern texts. Some historians of philosophy have adopted modified versions of his method, especially in studying medieval Jewish and Islamic authors.

Critics contend that Strauss’s search for hidden meanings risks over‑interpretation and relies on speculative reconstructions that cannot be independently verified. Others note that persecution does not always lead to esoteric writing, and that he sometimes extends the esoteric hypothesis to relatively free contexts. A further debate concerns whether Strauss’s own writings display analogous esoteric strategies, with scholars divided over how far to apply his method reflexively to his corpus.

7. Reason, Revelation, and Political Theology

The tension between philosophical reason and biblical revelation is a structural theme in Strauss’s work and informs his approach to political theology.

Athens and Jerusalem

Strauss famously evokes “Athens” and “Jerusalem” as shorthand for two comprehensive claims about the whole:

• Athens: the philosophical life, grounded in human reason and open inquiry.
• Jerusalem: biblical faith, grounded in divine revelation and obedience.

He portrays these as offering rival accounts of the good life and ultimate authority that cannot be harmonized without loss. For Strauss, this conflict is not merely psychological or sociological but theoretical: each stance makes universal claims that question the other’s legitimacy.

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“We are compelled to choose between the city of God as described by the Bible and the city of man as described by the philosophers; we cannot have both.”
— Leo Strauss, “Progress or Return?”

Commentators debate whether this statement reflects Strauss’s settled view or a deliberately sharpened formulation for pedagogical purposes.

Medieval Mediation and Political Theology

Strauss studies medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophers—especially Maimonides and al‑Farabi—as exemplars of attempts to mediate between philosophy and revealed law. In his reading, these thinkers accept the authority of divine law for the community while cultivating a space for philosophical inquiry, often through esoteric writing. This duality becomes a key model in his reflections on political theology, the way theological claims underpin political order.

Some interpreters see Strauss as suggesting that pre‑modern political theologies provided a more coherent moral framework than modern secularism. Others argue that he primarily uses medieval thought to clarify the depth of the reason–revelation conflict without endorsing a return to theocracy.

Modernity and the Fate of Revelation

Strauss links the rise of modern philosophy to efforts to neutralize or domesticate the challenge of revelation, either by reducing religion to morality or by historicizing biblical texts. He treats modern atheism and secularism as themselves shaped by the biblical tradition they seek to overcome. Readers diverge on whether Strauss personally favors the philosophical stance of Athens, regards the conflict as rationally undecidable, or maintains a deliberate reticence on his own position.

8. Impact on Political Theory and Legal Thought

Strauss’s influence extends across political theory, constitutional interpretation, and adjacent disciplines, though it is uneven and often contested.

Political Theory and the “Straussian School”

Strauss helped re‑establish normative political philosophy within a post‑war intellectual environment dominated by behavioralism and positivist social science. His insistence on reading canonical texts as living interlocutors, not merely historical artifacts, contributed to renewed engagement with Plato, Aristotle, and early modern thinkers. A loosely defined “Straussian school” of students and followers—clustered initially at the University of Chicago and later at institutions such as Claremont, St. John’s College, and several law schools—adopted his emphasis on close textual interpretation, natural right, and the reason–revelation tension.

In broader political theory, some communitarian and conservative thinkers have drawn on Strauss’s critique of relativism and mass culture, while others, including certain liberals, have engaged his work as a sharp challenge to historicist assumptions.

Legal and Constitutional Thought

Strauss’s impact on legal theory is largely indirect, transmitted through his students and readers who entered law schools and the judiciary. Elements of his thought have been associated with:

• Forms of originalism and textualism that stress authorial intention and the careful structure of founding documents.
• Renewed interest in natural law or natural rights as foundations for constitutional interpretation.
• Debates about civil religion and the theological underpinnings of constitutional order.

Supporters view Straussian approaches as enriching legal interpretation by reconnecting it with classical and early modern political philosophy. Critics argue that invoking Strauss can smuggle substantive moral or theological commitments into constitutional reasoning under the guise of historical scholarship.

Public and Policy Discourse

From the late 20th century onward, some commentators linked Strauss to neoconservative foreign policy approaches, especially through certain students and admirers involved in policy circles. Scholars disagree on how directly his writings support specific policy positions; many maintain that his work is primarily theoretical and that political appropriations often simplify or distort his arguments. Nonetheless, the association has significantly shaped public perceptions of Strauss in contemporary debates.

9. Criticisms and Controversies

Strauss’s work has generated extensive criticism across methodological, substantive, and political dimensions.

Methodological and Hermeneutic Critiques

Many historians of philosophy and classicists challenge Strauss’s theory of esoteric writing, arguing that it encourages speculative readings unsupported by historical evidence. They contend that apparent contradictions or structural oddities in texts often have rhetorical or genre‑specific explanations rather than hidden doctrines. Some critics also fault Strauss for under‑utilizing archival and contextual research in favor of close textual analysis.

Defenders respond that Strauss never claimed all texts are esoteric and that persecution and censorship provide a plausible rationale in many cases, especially for medieval Jewish and Islamic authors.

Critique of Historicism and Modernity

Philosophers sympathetic to historicism argue that Strauss misconstrues their position by depicting it as simple relativism, ignoring more complex accounts of how historical conditioning and critical evaluation can coexist. Others claim that his sharp ancients vs. moderns contrast oversimplifies both sides and downplays the normative aspirations of many modern thinkers.

In moral and political philosophy, some critics allege that Strauss’s recovery of natural right lacks a clear positive account of human nature or the good, leaving his alternative to relativism underdeveloped.

Political and Ideological Controversies

Strauss has been portrayed variously as a conservative, a critic of mass democracy, a covert defender of aristocracy, and, conversely, as a friend of liberal constitutionalism. Debates focus on:

• His comments on esoteric teaching, which some interpret as justifying elite manipulation of public opinion.
• His reception among neoconservative intellectuals, leading to claims that his thought underwrote interventionist foreign policies.
• His attitude toward liberal democracy, with readings ranging from cautious endorsement to deep‑seated skepticism.

Scholars differ sharply on these questions. Some see his work as a defense of constitutional democracy aware of its vulnerabilities; others view it as fundamentally anti‑egalitarian. The absence of explicit programmatic writings has contributed to divergent interpretations and ongoing controversy about Strauss’s own political commitments.

10. Legacy and Historical Significance

Strauss’s legacy lies less in a discrete doctrine than in a reorientation of how political philosophers approach classic texts and the crises of modernity.

Transformation of the History of Political Thought

In the post‑war academy, Strauss helped shift the study of canonical thinkers from a predominantly historical‑contextual or positivist frame toward philosophical engagement with their arguments. His insistence that Plato, Aristotle, Maimonides, Machiavelli, and Hobbes be read as interlocutors on enduring questions influenced several generations of scholars. Even critics often acknowledge that his provocative readings stimulated more rigorous debate about authorial intention, textual structure, and the interplay of philosophy and politics.

Enduring Themes

Strauss’s articulation of:

• the crisis of modernity and the limits of relativism,
• the tension between Athens and Jerusalem,
• and the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns

continues to shape discussions in political theory, philosophy of religion, and political theology. These themes have been taken up, revised, or contested by thinkers across the ideological spectrum.

Institutional and Cultural Impact

The informal Straussian school has maintained a visible presence in North American political science departments, some law schools, and liberal arts institutions emphasizing classical education. Through students and readers active in journalism, policy, and public debate, Strauss’s ideas have also entered broader cultural and political discourse, sometimes in simplified or polemical forms.

Assessments of his historical significance diverge. Admirers regard him as a major restorer of classical rationalism and a crucial critic of modern relativism. Skeptics see his influence as disproportionate to the solidity of his textual claims and worry about the political uses of his thought. Nonetheless, Strauss is widely recognized as a key figure in 20th‑century political philosophy whose work continues to frame arguments about the foundations and future of liberal democratic societies.