Strauss, Leo b. September 20, 1899; Kirchain, Hesse d. October 18, 1973;Annapolis, Maryland
German American conservative political philosopher. A central figure in the history of modern conservative thought in America, Strauss critiqued the leveling, relativistic tendencies of modernity.
For Strauss, the crisis of what he called the “Modern Project” was the denial of purpose and the erosion of universal standards of human thought and conduct, which he believed debased Western thought and set modern political systems on a self-destructive course. He argued that the cumulative efforts of modern thinkers beginning with Niccolo Machiavelli radically transformed political philosophy in a number of fundamental ways: by rejecting normative ideals for human behavior; by privileging selfpreservation as the highest human goal; by viewing nature as something to be overcome rather than as an immutable barrier to human aspiration; and by replacing human will for nature as the source of values. Strauss, a German Jewish emigre to the United States during the interwar migration of intellectuals fleeing Nazism, believed that both the horrors of Nazism and Fascism and the debasement of democratic principles on either side of the Atlantic testified to the failure of modern political ideologies.Raised in an orthodox Jewish family, Strauss attended the gymnasium in Marburg, where he became a Zionist at age seventeen. He served as an interpreter in the German army during World War I, before undertaking graduate studies at the universities of Marburg, Frankfurt, Berlin, and Hamburg, where he earned his PhD on Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s epistemology under the direction of Ernst Cassirer. He continued his education with postdoctoral studies in Giessen, Marburg, Berlin, and Freiburg, where he attended lectures by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. From 1922 to 1924, Strauss participated in Franz Rosenzweig’s Freies Judisches Lehrhaus (Free Jewish House of Learning), analyzing Baruch Spinoza’s religious thought and interrogating the tenability of Zionism.
In 1925 he accepted a position at the Akademie fur die Wissenschaft des Ju- dentums (Academy for the Scientific Study of Judaism), and then conducted research in Paris and London on a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship before emigrating to the United States in 1937. While in Europe, he worked his way from Spinoza to Moses Maimonides to Thomas Hobbes analyzing the “theologico-political” problem confronting modern Jewry and examining the tension between reason and revelation in the modern world. Prior to coming to United States at age thirty-eight, Strauss had grown increasingly doubtful that either rationalism or religion was an adequate foundation for the moral life.After Strauss’s permanent relocation to the United States in 1937, he held positions at Columbia University (1937) and the New School for Social Research (1938-1948), before becoming professor of political science at the University of Chicago from 1949 to 1967. He made his debut at Chicago with a series of lectures in October 1949 that formed the basis of what would become his best-known work, Natural Right and History (1953). Here Strauss challenged the view that modern natural right doctrines, which set the course in political theory toward radical historicism, had rendered classical natural right theory obsolete as a universal standard of justice. His insistence on the persistent relevance of natural right theory and his warning that relativism of contemporary social sciences was “bound to lead to disastrous consequences” established Strauss as an important, if controversial, political theorist in America. Strauss viewed teaching and scholarship as part of his obligation as a Socratic philosopher. His lasting influence on generations of students he trained at the University of Chicago, many of whom would later be identified as “Straussians,” helped to establish Strauss as the foremost conservative thinker of the postwar era.
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen
See also Intellectual Exile
References and Further Reading
Drury, Shadia. Leo Strauss and the American Right. New York: St. Martin's, 1997.
McAllister, Ted. Revolt against Modernity: Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and the Search for a Postliberal Order. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1968.
Pangle, Thomas L., ed. The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism: An Introduction to the Thought of Leo Strauss. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1989.