N.B.: The following is the first paragraph of a draft of a paper for an edited volume. Please send any corrections or suggestions to alexpriou@gmail.com.
For all the notoriety surrounding his name, Leo Strauss’ public activity was rather conventional of a serious scholar both then and now: writing books, essays, and reviews for his academic colleagues, while mentoring the next generation of scholars by overseeing dissertations and teaching graduate courses in his field. More conventional still, even old-fashioned, was his almost exclusive focus on the great works in the history of political philosophy. His conventional appearance, however, is belied by the great, even civilizational issues to which his books are explicitly addressed. Strauss observed, in a lecture delivered in 1941, that the German youth of the time might not have found nihilistic militarism as attractive, and thus might not have embraced the National Socialist Party so eagerly, had they simply had “old-fashioned teachers…undogmatic enough to understand the aspirations of their pupils.” It is indeed against just such a risk, in the United States, that his most famous and widely read work, Natural Right and History, also warns and to the prevention of which it is in part devoted. Strauss’s conventional appearance as one such “old-fashioned teacher” should not be attributed, as he himself says, to “self-forgetting and pain-loving antiquarianism nor self-forgetting and intoxicating romanticism.” It stems rather from a radical critique of the prevailing thought of his time as neither philosophically adequate nor politically salutary. Conventional as his appearance may have been, therefore, it is nevertheless evident that it had an altogether unconventional basis. What effect, we wonder, did Strauss intend to have within the academy? And what effect did he have?
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