Leo Strauss Quotes on Politics
Leo Strauss's Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952), Natural Right and History (1953), and Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958) developed the most influential twentieth-century revival of classical political philosophy. The principal hermeneutical thesis is that the great philosophers of the pre-modern tradition — Plato, Maimonides, Spinoza, Halevi — wrote with a deliberate exoteric/esoteric duality designed to communicate one set of teachings to careful readers and another to the general public, in response to the political conditions of philosophy in non-liberal societies. The substantive philosophical thesis is that modern political philosophy from Machiavelli through Hobbes to the present has progressively abandoned the classical conception of natural right and the philosophical life it grounded, and that the resulting political-philosophical situation requires the recovery of the ancient sources the moderns rejected.
Quotes
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“Liberal education is the counter-poison to mass culture.”
What is liberal education,” p. 5 The phrase “specialists without spirit or vision and voluptuaries without heart.” is from Max Weber . -
“Persecution gives rise to a peculiar technique of writing.”
p. 25 -
Attributed to Leo Strauss:
“Wisdom requires unhesitating loyalty to a decent constitution.”
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Attributed to Leo Strauss:
“The philosopher is and remains a stranger in the city.”
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“All political action aims at either preservation or change. When desiring to preserve, we wish to prevent a change for the worse; when desiring to change, we wish to bring about something better. All political action is then guided by some thought of better or worse.”
What Is Political Philosophy" in The Journal of Politics , 19 (3) (Aug. 1957) by the Southern Political Science Association, p. 343 -
“Note on the Plan of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil ", Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy 3, nos. 2 and 3 (1973)”
The emancipation of the scholars and scientists from philosophy is according to [Nietzsche] only a part of the democratic movement, i.e. of the emancipation of the low from subordination to the high. … The plebeian character of the contemporary scholar or scientist is due to the fact that he has no reverence for himself.