Leo Strauss

Leo Strauss was a German-American scholar of political philosophy who specialized in classical political philosophy. He was born in 1899 in the town of Kirchhain in Hesse, Germany, where his father sold farm equipment. He was raised in an observant Jewish home, though one without much Jewish learning. He graduated from the Gymnasium Philippinum in nearby Marburg in 1917. He served in the German army during World War I from July 5, 1917, to December 1918. He then enrolled in the University of Hamburg, where he received his doctorate in 1921 with his thesis “On the Problem of Knowledge in the Philosophical Doctrine of F. H. Jacobi” supervised by Ernst Cassirer. He also attended courses at the Universities of Freiburg and Marburg, including some taught by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. He joined a Jewish fraternity and worked for the German Zionist movement, which introduced him to various German Jewish intellectuals, such as Norbert Elias, Leo Löwenthal, Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin. Benjamin was and remained an admirer of Strauss and his work throughout his life. In 1925, Strauss began a research position at the Akademie für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin. In the years 1925-28, he wrote his first book, Die Religionskritik Spinozas als Grundlage seiner Bibelwissenschaft. Untersuchungen zu Spinozas Theologisch-politischem Traktat (1930; published in English as Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 1965). In 1932, he studied in Paris on a Rockefeller Fellowship. While there he married the widowed Mirjam Bernsohn whose son he later adopted. In 1933, Strauss and his family moved to England, again on a Rockefeller Fellowship. In 1936-37, he held a research fellowship at Cambridge University. In 1937, he was a research fellow at Columbia University. From 1938 to 1948, Strauss was a member of the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research. Paul Kraus had married Strauss’s sister Bettina, and Strauss adopted their only child, a daughter, upon the death of both parents in Egypt. In 1949, Strauss joined the University of Chicago as a professor in the Department of Political Science, and in 1959 was appointed Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor. He moved in 1968 to Claremont Men’s College for a year and a half, and in 1969 to St. John’s College-Annapolis, where he served as the Scott Buchanan Distinguished Scholar in Residence until his death in 1973. Strauss is widely regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. He is best known for his interpretation of classical political philosophy and its relevance to modern politics. He argued that the crisis of modernity stemmed from the loss of natural right as a standard for political action and judgment. He sought to recover the wisdom of ancient thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Xenophon, Cicero and Machiavelli, as well as medieval and modern philosophers such as Maimonides, Al-Farabi, Hobbes, Locke and Nietzsche. He also engaged with contemporary thinkers such as Heidegger, Kojève, Schmitt and Arendt. He developed a distinctive approach to reading texts that he called "esotericism", which claimed that many philosophers wrote between the lines to conceal their true teachings from the uninitiated and the authorities. He influenced many students and followers, such as Allan Bloom, Harry Jaffa, Harvey Mansfield, Thomas Pangle, Richard Rorty and Charles Taylor. He also had a significant impact on the neoconservative movement in the United States.