Leo Strauss 1899 – 1973

Leo Strauss was a German-Jewish philosopher who emigrated to the United States in 1937 and spent most of his career at the University of Chicago. He devoted his work to the recovery of classical political philosophy and to the interpretation of texts that, he argued, had been written to communicate dangerous truths esoterically. His readings of Plato, Maimonides, Spinoza, Hobbes, and Machiavelli presented modern political philosophy as a deliberate departure from the ancients, and his diagnosis of the crisis of modernity centered on the loss of the question of the best regime. He shaped a school of political interpretation that has had wide and contested influence.

Leo Strauss was born in 1899 in Kirchhain, Hesse, into an Orthodox Jewish family. He served briefly in the German army at the end of the First World War, took his doctorate in philosophy at Hamburg in 1921 under Ernst Cassirer, and studied with Husserl and Heidegger at Freiburg. From 1925 he worked at the Akademie fur die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin, where his Spinoza's Critique of Religion (1930) was his first major book.

A Rockefeller fellowship took him out of Germany in 1932, and after years in Paris, Cambridge, and London he settled in 1938 in the United States, teaching first at the New School for Social Research in New York and from 1949 to 1969 as the Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952), Natural Right and History (1953), Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958), What Is Political Philosophy? (1959), and The City and Man (1964) are among his principal works.

Strauss read the canon — from Plato and Maimonides to Hobbes, Spinoza, and Nietzsche — as a long argument between ancients and moderns, recovered the practice of esoteric writing as a key to interpretation, and became the most powerful critic of twentieth-century historicism and value-free social science. He died in Annapolis in 1973, leaving a school of students whose influence on American political thought extends far beyond the academy.