By Catherine H. Zuckert
Is Leo Strauss really an highbrow forebear of neoconservatism and a strong strength in shaping Bush management international coverage? the reality approximately Leo Strauss places this query to relaxation, revealing for the 1st time how the preferred media got here to perpetuate an oversimplified view of a fancy and wide-ranging thinker. In doing so, it corrects our belief of Strauss, supplying the easiest common creation to be had to the political considered this misunderstood figure. Catherine and Michael Zuckert—both former scholars of Strauss—guide readers right here to a nuanced knowing of the way Strauss’s political suggestion matches into his broader philosophy. difficult the information that Strauss used to be an rigid conservative who within the footsteps of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Carl Schmitt, the Zuckerts contend that Strauss’s signature suggestion used to be the necessity for a go back to the ancients. via their paintings, they finish that Strauss used to be a sober defender of liberal democracy, conscious of either its strengths and its weaknesses. Balanced and available, the reality approximately Leo Strauss is a must-read for an individual who desires to extra totally understand this enigmatic thinker and his much-disputed legacy. “The fact approximately Leo Strauss is the main balanced and insightful booklet but written approximately Strauss’s notion, scholars, and political impact. It dispels myths promulgated by means of either neighbors and foes and persuasively lines the conflicting paths that American thinkers indebted to Strauss have taken.”—William Galston, Brookings establishment
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Additional info for The Truth about Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy and American Democracy
Sample text
He is a believer in suprasensible, disembodied “forms” or “ideas,” which are the true beings, of which the beings we experience are mere reflections or imitations. He is a believer in a soul separate from the body. He is the advocate of the rule of philosophers and the devotee of an extraordinarily high-minded moral doctrine. This traditional understanding of Plato appeared to have support in the Platonic texts; in the Republic, for example, the philosophers’ knowledge of the eternal ideas is posited as the basis for their claim to sovereignty.
In 1925 Strauss began working at the German Academy of Jewish Research in Berlin on an edition of the collected works of Moses Mendelssohn, one of the German Jewish humanists. In 1931 a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation enabled him to do research in France and England. When his grant ran out, he decided not to return to the newly established Third Reich. Instead he went to New York, where he obtained a position at the New School for Social Research. He stayed there until 1948, when Robert Maynard Hutchins brought him to the University of Chicago.
4 The second source, we think, was the range, novelty, and depth of his presentation of the history of political philosophy. Strauss wrote and taught about political philosophers from Socrates to Heidegger, including, it seemed, almost every philosopher of note in between. His readings of the the return to the ancients 29 Islamic and Jewish medieval philosophers contributed to the reshaping of the study of those writers. His reading of Plato has had a large, often unrecognized influence on the study of ancient political philosophy.
