Leo Strauss - The relationships between reason and revelation, between philosophy and politics, and between ancient and modern thought

Leo Strauss and American Conservatism

by Carson Holloway

Contrary to popular belief, Leo Strauss was not a conservative, let alone a neoconservative. Yet Strauss and conservatism share an important aim: challenging the dogmatic dismissal of the past as irrelevant to our flourishing in the present.

What is the significance of Leo Strauss for American politics, and particularly for American conservatism? For many, the answer to this question is obvious: Strauss is the philosophic forefather of the neoconservative foreign policy thinking that influenced the administration of George W. Bush and thereby led to the Iraq war.

Unfortunately, because of the overheated and polarized character of our public discourse, the most popularly obvious assessment is not always the most sensible one. Such is the case with regard to this understanding of Strauss’s political significance. It takes an imagination inflamed by partisan and ideological animosity to hold a scholar like Strauss—whose body of work consists almost entirely of meditations on the history of political philosophy, and contains almost no remarks on questions of contemporary public policy—responsible for political decisions taken more than thirty years after his death.

In their 2008 book, The Truth About Leo Strauss, Michael and Catherine Zuckert—both of the University of Notre Dame, and two of Strauss’s most eminent students—performed a valuable public service by providing a detailed refutation of the many foolish and tendentious efforts to involve Strauss in the disputes that have roiled American politics for the last decade. Now, having dealt with such errors, they have turned to a more positive and no doubt more intellectually satisfying task: an account of Strauss’s thought in relation to the core concerns of his scholarship.

The resulting book, Leo Strauss and the Problem of Political Philosophy, is both a pleasure and a challenge. It is a pleasure because the lucidity of the Zuckerts’ exposition renders clear and accessible Strauss’s thinking on some questions that remain somewhat opaque in Strauss’s own writings. These are questions that Strauss—for reasons that the Zuckerts helpfully illuminate—chose to answer only indirectly.

The book also remains a challenge, however, because the kind of questions to which Strauss dedicated his life—the relationships between reason and revelation, between philosophy and politics, and between ancient and modern thought—are so difficult in themselves, and are treated by Strauss with such penetration, that even the clearest account of them calls for the utmost exertion of the reader’s intellect. The challenge of such exertion, however, ultimately leads back to pleasure, the elevated kind of pleasure Strauss continually praised: the pleasure of understanding the nature of things.


- Was Strauss a Conservative? ...

- Liberalism, Inequality, and the Good ...

- Relativism and the Good Life ...

- Openness to and Respect for the Past ...

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