Leo Strauss

Leo Strauss was a German-born American political philosopher who left Germany in 1932 and taught at the New School in New York and then, for twenty years, at the University of Chicago. He argued that modern thought had lost sight of the classical question of the best way of life. In Natural Right and History he defended the idea of natural right against historicism and against the separation of facts from values. He is also known for his claim that earlier philosophers often wrote between the lines to avoid persecution.

Key ideas

• Historicism and the fact–value distinction lead towards relativism and nihilism about justice.
• Classical natural right, found in Plato and Aristotle, holds that there is a standard of right grounded in nature.
• Modern political philosophy, from Machiavelli and Hobbes onwards, lowered the aims of politics from virtue to security and comfort.
• Under threat of persecution, philosophers often wrote esoterically, hiding their true teaching from most readers.
• Western civilisation lives in tension between Athens and Jerusalem, philosophy and revelation.

Major works

• Natural Right and History (1953)
• Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952)
• The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (1936)
• On Tyranny (1948)
• Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958)
• The City and Man (1964)

In the Book corner

• Natural Right and History 1953 · Advanced
  A study, based on Strauss's Walgreen Lectures of 1949, of whether there is a natural standard of right by which political societies…

In the conversation

No topics yet. Start one about this thinker.