Leo Strauss (September 20, 1899 – October 18, 1973) was a German-American political philosopher and classicist who specialized in classical political philosophy. He was born in Germany to Jewish parents and later emigrated to the United States. He spent most of his career as a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, where he taught several generations of students and published fifteen books.^[1]

Originally trained in the Neo-Kantian tradition with Ernst Cassirer and immersed in the work of the phenomenologists Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, Strauss later focused his research on the Greek texts of Plato and Aristotle, retracing their interpretation through medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophy, and encouraged application of their ideas to contemporary political theory.^[2]

Early life[link]

Leo Strauss was born in the small town of Kirchhain in Hessen-Nassau, a province of the Kingdom of Prussia (part of the German Empire), on September 20, 1899, to Hugo Strauss and Jennie Strauss, née David. According to Allan Bloom's 1974 obituary in Political Theory, Strauss "was raised as an Orthodox Jew," but the family does not appear to have completely embraced Orthodox practice.^[3] Strauss himself noted that he came from a "conservative, even orthodox Jewish home," but one which knew little about Judaism except strict adherence to ceremonial laws. His father and uncle operated a farm supply and livestock business that they inherited from their father, Meyer (1835–1919), a leading member of the local Jewish community.^[4]

Education[link]

After attending the Kirchhain Volksschule and the Protestant Rektoratsschule, Leo Strauss was enrolled at the Gymnasium Philippinum (affiliated with the University of Marburg) in nearby Marburg (from which Johannes Althusius and Carl J. Friedrich also graduated) in 1912, graduating in 1917. He boarded with the Marburg Cantor Strauss (no relation); the Cantor's residence served as a meeting place for followers of the neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen. Strauss served in the German army during World War I from July 5, 1917 to December 1918.

Strauss subsequently enrolled in the University of Hamburg, where he received his doctorate in 1921; his thesis, "On the Problem of Knowledge in the Philosophical Doctrine of F. H. Jacobi", was supervised by Ernst Cassirer. He also attended courses at the Universities of Freiburg and Marburg, including some taught by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Strauss 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. Strauss' closest friend was Jacob Klein but he also was intellectually engaged with Karl Löwith, Julius Guttman, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Franz Rosenzweig (to whom Strauss dedicated his first book), Gershom Scholem, Alexander Altmann, and the Arabist Paul Kraus, who married Strauss' sister Bettina (Strauss and his wife later adopted their child when both parents died in the Middle East). With several of these friends, Strauss carried on vigorous epistolary exchanges later in life, many of which are published in the Gesammelte Schriften (Collected Writings), some in translation from the German. Strauss had also been engaged in a discourse with Carl Schmitt. However, when Strauss left Germany, he broke off this discourse when Schmitt failed to answer his letters.

In 1931 Strauss sought his post-doctoral (Habilitation) with the theologian Paul Tillich, but was turned down. After receiving a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1932, Strauss left his position at the Academy of Jewish Research in Berlin for Paris. He returned to Germany only once, for a few short days 20 years later. In Paris he married Marie (Miriam) Bernsohn, a widow with a young child whom he had known previously in Germany. He adopted his wife's son, Thomas, and later his sister's child; he and Miriam had no biological children of their own. At his death he was survived by Thomas, his sister's daughter Jenny Strauss Clay, and three grandchildren. Strauss became a lifelong friend of Alexandre Kojève and was on friendly terms with Raymond Aron, Alexandre Koyré, and Étienne Gilson. Because of the Nazis' rise to power, he chose not to return to his native country. Strauss found shelter, after some vicissitudes, in England, where in 1935 he gained temporary employment at University of Cambridge, with the help of his in-law, David Daube, who was affiliated with Gonville and Caius College. While in England, he became a close friend of R. H. Tawney, and was on less friendly terms with Isaiah Berlin.^[5]

Later years[link]

The University of Chicago, the school with which Strauss is most closely associated.

Unable to find permanent employment in England, Strauss moved in 1937 to the United States, under the patronage of Harold Laski, who bestowed upon Strauss a brief lectureship. After a short stint as Research Fellow in the Department of History at Columbia University, Strauss secured a position at The New School, where, between 1938 and 1948, he eked out a hand-to-mouth living in the political science faculty. In 1939, he served for a short term as a visiting professor at Hamilton College. He became a U.S. citizen in 1944, and in 1949 he became a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, where he received, for the first time in his life, a good wage. In 1954 he met Löwith and Gadamer in Heidelberg and delivered a public speech on Socrates. Strauss held the Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professorship in Chicago until 1969. He had received a call for a temporary lectureship in Hamburg in 1965 (which he declined for health reasons) and received and accepted an honorary doctorate from Hamburg University and the Bundesverdienstkreuz (German Order of Merit) via the German representative in Chicago. In 1969 Strauss moved to Claremont McKenna College (formerly Claremont Men's College) in California for a year, and then to St. John's College, Annapolis in 1970, where he was the Scott Buchanan Distinguished Scholar in Residence until his death from pneumonia in 1973.^[6]

Philosophy[link]

For Strauss, politics and philosophy were necessarily intertwined. He regarded the trial and death of Socrates as the moment when political philosophy came into existence. Strauss considered one of the most important moments in the history of philosophy Socrates' argument that philosophers could not study nature without considering their own human nature, which, in the words of Aristotle, is that of "a political animal."^[7]

Strauss distinguished "scholars" from "great thinkers", identifying himself as a scholar. He wrote that most self-described philosophers are in actuality scholars, cautious and methodical. Great thinkers, in contrast, boldly and creatively address big problems. Scholars deal with these problems only indirectly by reasoning about the great thinkers' differences.^[8]

In Natural Right and History Strauss begins with a critique of Max Weber's epistemology, briefly engages the relativism of Martin Heidegger (who goes unnamed), and continues with a discussion of the evolution of natural rights via an analysis of the thought of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. He concludes by critiquing Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Edmund Burke. At the heart of the book are excerpts from Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero. Much of his philosophy is a reaction to the works of Heidegger. Indeed, Strauss wrote that Heidegger's thinking must be understood and confronted before any complete formulation of modern political theory is possible.

Strauss wrote that Friedrich Nietzsche was the first philosopher to properly understand relativism, an idea grounded in a general acceptance of Hegelian historicism. Heidegger, in Strauss' view, sanitized and politicized Nietzsche, whereas Nietzsche believed "our own principles, including the belief in progress, will become as relative as all earlier principles had shown themselves to be" and "the only way out seems to be...that one voluntarily choose life-giving delusion instead of deadly truth, that one fabricate a myth".^[9] Heidegger believed that the tragic nihilism of Nietzsche was a "myth" guided by a defective Western conception of Being that Heidegger traced to Plato. In his published correspondence with Alexandre Kojève, Strauss wrote that Hegel was correct when he postulated that an end of history implies an end to philosophy as understood by classical political philosophy.^[10]

Strauss on reading[link]

Strauss's study of Arabic texts, above all those of Al-Farabi, was instrumental in the development of his theory of reading.

In 1952 Strauss published Persecution and the Art of Writing, commonly understood to advance the argument that some philosophers write in such a way as to avoid persecution by political or religious authorities. Some of Strauss's students (most notably Mansfield and Benardete) have read their teacher as interested in a philosophical "esotericism" aimed primarily at protecting politics from philosophy – the reasoning of which might negatively affect opinions undergirding the political order. Taking his bearings from his study of Maimonides and Al Farabi, and pointing further back to Plato's discussion of writing as contained in the Phaedrus), Strauss proposed that the classical and medieval art of exoteric writing is the proper medium for philosophic learning: rather than displaying superficially philosophers' thoughts, classical and medieval philosophical texts guide their readers in thinking and learning independently of imparted knowledge. Thus, Strauss agrees with the Socrates of the Phaedrus, where the Greek indicates that, insofar as writing does not respond when questioned, good writing provokes questions in the reader--questions that orient the reader towards an understanding of problems the author thought about with utmost seriousness. Both for Strauss and for Plato, genuinely philosophical writing does not impart special knowledge to its reader, but helps its reader deepen his understanding of the problems underlying all special knowledge: those readers who seek special knowledge in Platonic dialogues have the propensity to apply fragments of philosophical discourse to political life, thereby betraying the cause of genuinely philosophical writers. The case of the trial of Socrates is paradigmatic.

Strauss's general "hermeneutical" argument--rearticulated throughout his subsequent writings (most notably in The City and Man--1978)--is that prior to the XIX century, Western scholars commonly understood that philosophical writing is not at home in any polity, no matter how liberal. Insofar as it questions conventional wisdom at its roots, philosophy must guard itself especially against those readers who believe themselves authoritative, wise, and liberal defenders of the status quo. In questioning established opinions, or in investigating the principles of morality, philosophers of old found it necessary to convey their messages in an oblique manner. Their "art of writing" was the art of exoteric communication. This is all the more apparent in medieval times, when heterodox political thinkers wrote under the threat of the Inquisition or comparably intransigent tribunals.

Strauss's argument is not that the medieval writers he studies reserved one exoteric meaning for the many (hoi polloi) and an esoteric/hidden one for the few (hoi aristoi), but that, through rhetorical stratagems including self-contradiction and hyperboles, said writers succeeded in conveying meaning proper at the tacit heart of their writings--a heart or message irreducible to "the letter" or historical dimension of texts.

Explicitely following G.E. Lessing's lead, Strauss indicates that medieval political philosophers, no less than their ancient counterparts, in writing, carefully adapted their wording to the dominant moral views of their time, lest their writings be condemned as heretical or unjust, not by "the many" (who did not read), but by those "few" whom the many regarded as the most righteous guardians of morality: precisely these few righteous personalities would be most inclined to persecute/ostracize anyone who is in the business of exposing the noble or great lie upon which stands or falls the authority of the few over the many.^[11]

Some scholars unfamiliar with common medieval hermeneutics (most notably, Shadia Drury), have found fault with Strauss's contention that pre-modern political philosophers upheld an "exoteric" or salutary teaching in the act of pointing to an "esoteric" or true teaching, which remained hidden to the non-philosophical reader. For highlighting the classical and medieval distinction between esoteric and exoteric dimensions of speech, Strauss is often accused of having written esoterically. The accusation would seem to rest upon the belief that in modern liberal societies and especially the USA philosophers are free to voice their philosophical views in public without being accused of impropriety.^[12]

Leo Strauss's appreciation of moderation or restraint in writing is manifest in his favoring Jane Austen over otherwise more thoughtful modern novelists.^[13]

Strauss on politics[link]

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According to Strauss, modern social science is flawed because it assumes the fact-value distinction, a concept which Strauss finds dubious, tracing its roots in Enlightenment philosophy to Max Weber, a thinker whom Strauss described as a "serious and noble mind.” Weber wanted to separate values from science but, according to Strauss, was really a derivative thinker, deeply influenced by Nietzsche’s relativism.^[14] Strauss treated politics as something that could not be studied from afar. A political scientist examining politics with a value-free scientific eye, for Strauss, was self-deluded. Positivism, the heir to both Auguste Comte and Max Weber in the quest to make purportedly value-free judgments, failed to justify its own existence, which would require a value judgment.^[15]

While modern liberalism had stressed the pursuit of individual liberty as its highest goal, Strauss felt that there should be a greater interest in the problem of human excellence and political virtue. Through his writings, Strauss constantly raised the question of how, and to what extent, freedom and excellence can coexist. Strauss refused to make do with any simplistic or one-sided resolutions of the Socratic question: What is the good for the city and man?^[16]

Encounters with Schmitt and Kojève[link]

Two significant political-philosophical dialogues Strauss had with living thinkers were those he held with Carl Schmitt and Alexandre Kojève. Schmitt, who would later become, for a short time, the chief jurist of Nazi Germany, was one of the first important German academics to review Strauss's early work positively. Schmitt's positive reference for, and approval of, Strauss's work on Hobbes was instrumental in winning Strauss the scholarship funding that allowed him to leave Germany.^[17]

Strauss's critique and clarifications of The Concept of the Political led Schmitt to make significant emendations in its second edition. Writing to Schmitt in 1932, Strauss summarised Schmitt's political theology that "because man is by nature evil, he therefore needs dominion. But dominion can be established, that is, men can be unified only in a unity against - against other men. Every association of men is necessarily a separation from other men... the political thus understood is not the constitutive principle of the state, of order, but a condition of the state."^[18]

Strauss, however, directly opposed Schmitt's position. For Strauss, Schmitt and his return to Thomas Hobbes helpfully clarified the nature of our political existence and our modern self-understanding. Schmitt's position was therefore symptomatic of the modern liberal self-understanding. Strauss believed that such an analysis, as in Hobbes's time, served as a useful "preparatory action", revealing our contemporary orientation towards the eternal problems of politics (social existence). However, Strauss believed that Schmitt's reification of our modern self-understanding of the problem of politics into a political theology was not an adequate solution. Strauss instead advocated a return to a broader classical understanding of human nature and a tentative return to political philosophy, in the tradition of the ancient philosophers.^[19]

With Kojève, Strauss had a close and lifelong philosophical friendship. They had first met as students in Berlin. The two thinkers shared a boundless philosophical respect for each other. Kojève would later write that, without befriending Strauss, "I never would have known... what philosophy is."^[20] The political-philosophical dispute between Kojève and Strauss centred on the role that philosophy should and can be allowed to play in politics.

Kojève, who as a senior statesman in the French government was instrumental in the creation of the European Economic Community, argued that philosophers should have an active role in shaping political events. Strauss, on the contrary, believed that philosophy and political conditions were fundamentally opposed and that philosophers should not and must not have a role in politics, noting the disastrous results of Plato's attempt to educate and "guide" the tyrant Dion of Syracuse. Strauss believed that philosophers should play a role in politics only to the extent that they can ensure that philosophy, which he saw as mankind's highest activity, can be free from political intervention.^[21]

Liberalism and nihilism[link]

Strauss taught that liberalism in its modern form contained within it an intrinsic tendency towards extreme relativism, which in turn led to two types of nihilism^[22]:

The first was a “brutal” nihilism, expressed in Nazi and Marxist regimes. In On Tyranny, he wrote that these ideologies, both descendants of Enlightenment thought, tried to destroy all traditions, history, ethics, and moral standards and replace them by force under which nature and mankind are subjugated and conquered.^[23] The second type – the "gentle" nihilism expressed in Western liberal democracies – was a kind of value-free aimlessness and a hedonistic "permissive egalitarianism", which he saw as permeating the fabric of contemporary American society.^[24][25]

In the belief that 20th century relativism, scientism, historicism, and nihilism were all implicated in the deterioration of modern society and philosophy, Strauss sought to uncover the philosophical pathways that had led to this situation. The resultant study led him to advocate a tentative return to classical political philosophy as a starting point for judging political action.^[26]

Strauss's Interpretation of Plato's Republic[link]

According to Strauss, Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies had mistaken the city-in-speech described in Plato's Republic is not a blueprint for regime reform. Strauss quotes Cicero, "The Republic does not bring to light the best possible regime but rather the nature of political things – the nature of the city."^[27]

Strauss argued that the city-in-speech was unnatural, precisely because "it is rendered possible by the abstraction from eros".^[28] The city-in-speech abstracted from eros, or bodily needs. Though skeptical of "progress", Strauss was equally skeptical about political agendas of "return" (which is the term he used in contrast to progress).

In fact, he was consistently suspicious of anything claiming to be a solution to an old political or philosophical problem. He spoke of the danger in trying to finally resolve the debate between rationalism and traditionalism in politics. In particular, along with many in the pre-World War II German Right, he feared people trying to force a world state to come into being in the future, thinking that it would inevitably become a tyranny.^[29]

Ancients and moderns[link]

Strauss constantly stressed the importance of two dichotomies in political philosophy: Athens and Jerusalem (Reason and Revelation) and Ancient versus Modern. The "Ancients" were the Socratic philosophers and their intellectual heirs, and the "Moderns" start with Niccolò Machiavelli. The contrast between Ancients and Moderns was understood to be related to the unresolvable tension between Reason and Revelation. The Socratics, reacting to the first Greek philosophers, brought philosophy back to earth, and hence back to the marketplace, making it more political. ^[30]

The Moderns reacted to the dominance of revelation in medieval society by promoting the possibilities of Reason very strongly. They objected the merger of natural right and natural theology proposed by Thomas Aquinas which resulted in the vulnerability of natural right to theological disputes along with Aquinas' moral rigidity highlighted by the prohibition of divorce and birth control.^[31] Thomas Hobbes, under the influence of Francis Bacon, re-oriented political thought to what was most solid but most low in man, setting a precedent for John Locke and the later economic approach to political thought, such as, initially, in David Hume and Adam Smith.^[32]

Strauss and Zionism[link]

As a youth, Strauss was a political Zionist, belonging to the German Zionist youth group, along with friends Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin, who were both strong admirers of Strauss, and would continue to be so throughout their lives.^[33] When he was 17, as he said, he was "converted" to political Zionism as a follower of Vladimir Jabotinsky. He served several years in the activities of the German Zionist youth movement, writing several essays pertaining to its controversies, but had left these activities behind by his early twenties.^[34]

While Strauss maintained a sympathy and interest in Zionism, he later came to refer to Zionism as "problematic" and became disillusioned with some of its aims.

He taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, for 1954–55 academic year. In his letter to a National Review editor, Strauss asked why Israel is called a racist state in an article in that journal. He argues that the author did not provide enough proof for his argument. He ends up his essay with the following statement:^[35]

Political Zionism is problematic for obvious reasons. But I can never forget what it achieved as a moral force in an era of complete dissolution. It helped to stem the tide of "progressive" leveling of venerable, ancestral differences; it fulfilled a conservative function.

Religious belief[link]

Although Strauss espoused the utility of religious belief, there is some question about his views on its truth.^[36] In some quarters the opinion has been that, whatever his views on the utility of religion, he was personally an atheist.^[36] Strauss, however, was openly disdainful of atheism, as he made apparent in his writings on Max Weber. He especially disapproved of contemporary dogmatic disbelief, which he considered intemperate and irrational and felt that one should either be "the philosopher open to the challenge of theology or the theologian open to the challenge of philosophy."^[37] One interpretation is that Strauss, in the interplay of Jerusalem and Athens, or revelation and reason, sought, as did Thomas Aquinas, to hold revelation to the rigours of reason, but where Aquinas saw an amicable interplay, Strauss saw two impregnable fortresses.^[38] Werner Dannhauser, in analyzing Strauss' letters, writes, "It will not do to simply think of Strauss as a godless, a secular, a lukewarm Jew."^[36] As one commenter, Edward Feser, put it:

Strauss was not himself an orthodox believer, neither was he a convinced atheist. Since whether or not to accept a purported divine revelation is itself one of the “permanent” questions, orthodoxy must always remain an option equally as defensible as unbelief.^[39]

Feser's statement invites the suspicion that Strauss may have been an un-convinced atheist, or that he welcomed religion as merely (practically) useful, rather than as true. The supposition that Strauss was an unconvinced atheist is not necessarily incompatible with Dannhauser's tentative claim that Strauss was an atheist behind closed doors. Hilail Gildin responded to Dannhauser's reading in "Déjà Jew All Over Again: Dannhauser on Leo Strauss and Atheism," an article published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Gildin exposed inconsistencies between Strauss's writings and Dannhauser's claims; Gildin also questioned the inherent consistency of Dannhauser's admittedly tentative evaluation of Strauss's understanding of divinity and religion.^[40]

At the end of his The City and Man, Strauss invites his reader to "be open to the full impact of the all-important question which is coeval with philosophy although the philosophers do not frequently pronounce it--the question quid sit deus" (p. 241). As a philosopher, Strauss would be interested in knowing the nature of divinity, instead of trying to dispute the very being of divinity. But Strauss did not remain "neutral" to the question about the "quid" of divinity. Already in his Natural Right and History, he defended a Socratic (Platonic, Ciceronian, and Aristotelian) reading of divinity, distinguishing it from a materialistic/conventionalist or Epicurean reading^[41]. Here, the question of "religion" (what is religion?) is inseparable from the question of the nature of civil society, and thus of civil right, or right having authoritative representation, or right capable of defending itself (Latin: Jus). Atheism, whether convinced (overt) or unconvinced (tacit), is integral to the conventionalist reading of civil authority, and thereby of religion in its originally civil valence, a reading against which Strauss argues throughout his volume.^[42] Thus Strauss's own arguments contradict the thesis imputed to him post mortem by scholars such as S. Drury who profess that Strauss approached religion as an instrument devoid of inherent purpose or meaning.

Critical views of Strauss[link]

Some critics of Strauss have accused him of being elitist, illiberalist and anti-democratic. Shadia Drury, in Leo Strauss and the American Right (1999), claimed that Strauss inculcated an elitist strain in American political leaders linked to imperialist militarism, neoconservatism and Christian fundamentalism. Drury argues that Strauss teaches that "perpetual deception of the citizens by those in power is critical because they need to be led, and they need strong rulers to tell them what's good for them." Nicholas Xenos similarly argues that Strauss was "an anti-democrat in a fundamental sense, a true reactionary. According to Xenos, "Strauss was somebody who wanted to go back to a previous, pre-liberal, pre-bourgeois era of blood and guts, of imperial domination, of authoritarian rule, of pure fascism."^[43]

Strauss has also been criticized by some conservatives. According to Claes Ryn, Strauss's anti-historicist thinking creates an artificial contrast between moral universality and "the conventional," "the ancestral," and "the historical." Strauss, Ryn argues, wrongly and reductionistically assumes that respecting tradition must undermine reason and universality. Contrary to Strauss's criticism of Edmund Burke, the historical sense may in fact be indispensable to an adequate apprehension of universality. Strauss's abstract, ahistorical conception of natural right actually distorts genuine universality, Ryn contends. Strauss does not consider the possibility that real universality becomes known to human beings in concretized, particular form. Strauss and the Straussians have paradoxically taught philosophically unsuspecting American conservatives, not least Roman Catholic intellectuals to reject tradition in favor of ahistorical theorizing, a bias that flies in the face of the central Christian notion of the Incarnation, the latter being an example of the possibility of synthesis between the universal and the historical. According to Ryn, the propagation of a purely abstract idea of universality has contributed to the neoconservative advocacy of allegedly universal American principles, which neconservatives see as justification for American intervention around the world. Strauss's anti-historical thinking connects him and his followers with the French Jacobins, who also regarded tradition as incompatible with virtue and rationality.^[44] What Ryn calls the "new Jacobinism" of the "neoconservative" philosophy is, writes Paul Gottfried, also the rhetoric of Saint-Just and Trotsky that the philosophically impoverished American Right has taken over with mindless alacrity. Republican operators and think tanks apparently believe they can carry the electorate by appealing to yesterday’s leftist clichés.^[45][46]

Journalists, such as Seymour Hersh, have opined that Strauss endorsed noble lies, "myths used by political leaders seeking to maintain a cohesive society".^[47][48] In The City and Man, Strauss discusses the myths outlined in Plato's Republic that are required for all governments. These include a belief that the state's land belongs to it even though it was likely acquired illegitimately and that citizenship is rooted in something more than the accidents of birth.^[49]

Response to criticisms[link]

In his 2009 book, Straussophobia, Peter Minowitz provides a detailed critique of Drury, Xenos, and other critics of Strauss whom he accuses of “bigotry and buffoonery.”^[50] In his 2006 book review of Reading Leo Strauss, by Steven B. Smith, Robert Alter writes that Smith "persuasively sets the record straight on Strauss's political views and on what his writing is really about."^[51] Smith refutes the link between Strauss and neoconservative thought (a link that some commentators have controversially made), arguing that Strauss was never personally active in politics, never endorsed imperialism, and questioned the utility of political philosophy for the practice of politics. In particular, Strauss argued that Plato's myth of the Philosopher king should be read as a reductio ad absurdum, and that philosophers should understand politics, not in order to influence policy, except insofar as they can ensure philosophy's autonomy from politics.^[52] Additionally, Mark Lilla has argued that the attribution to Strauss of neoconservative views contradicts a careful reading of Strauss' actual texts, in particular On Tyranny. Lilla summarizes Strauss as follows:

Philosophy must always be aware of the dangers of tyranny, as a threat to both political decency and the philosophical life. It must understand enough about politics to defend its own autonomy, without falling into the error of thinking that philosophy can shape the political world according to its own lights.^[53]

Finally, responding to charges that Strauss's teachings fostered the neoconservative foreign policy of the George W. Bush administration, such as "unrealistic hopes for the spread of liberal democracy through military conquest," Professor Nathan Tarcov, Director of the Leo Strauss Center at the University of Chicago, in an article published in The American Interest asserts that Strauss as a political philosopher was essentially non-political. After an exegesis of the very limited practical political views to be gleaned from Strauss's writings, Tarcov concludes that "Strauss can remind us of the permanent problems, but we have only ourselves to blame for our faulty solutions to the problems of today."^[54] Likewise Strauss's daughter, Jenny Strauss Clay, in a New York Times article defended her father against the charge that he was the "mastermind behind the neoconservative ideologues who control United States foreign policy." "He was a conservative," she says, "insofar as he did not think change is necessarily change for the better." Since contemporary academia "leaned to the left" with its "unquestioned faith in progress and science combined with a queasiness regarding any kind of moral judgment," Strauss questioned the tenets of the left. Had academia leaned to the right he'd have questioned—and did question—the tenets of the right as well.^[55] In sum, to the charge of fostering political ideology, whether of the Bush administration or any other, Strauss would plead not guilty—according to him the perennial problem remains whether those already ill-disposed could give political philosophy a fair hearing.^[56]

Notable students and Straussians[link]

Notable people who studied under Strauss, or attended his lecture courses at the University of Chicago, include Hadley Arkes, Seth Benardete, Allan Bloom, Werner Dannhauser, Murray Dry, William Galston, Victor Gourevitch, Harry V. Jaffa,^[57] Roger Masters,^[58] Thomas Pangle, Stanley Rosen, Abram Shulsky (Director of the Office of Special Plans),^[47] Susan Sontag,^[59] and Paul Wolfowitz (who attended two lecture courses by Strauss on Plato and Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws at the University of Chicago). Harvey C. Mansfield, though never a student of Strauss, is a noted "Straussian" (as some followers of Strauss identify themselves). Richard Rorty described Strauss as a particular influence in his early studies at the University of Chicago, where Rorty studied a "classical curriculum" under Strauss.^[60][61]

See also[link]

conservatism portal

• American philosophy
• List of American philosophers

Notes[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Leo Strauss

Bibliography[link]

Publications by Leo Strauss[link]

Books and articles

• Gesammelte Schriften. Ed. Heinrich Meier. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1996–. Four vols. published to date: Vol. 1, Die Religionskritik Spinozas und zugehörige Schriften (rev. ed. 2001); vol. 2, Philosophie und Gesetz, Frühe Schriften (1997); Vol. 3, Hobbes' politische Wissenschaft und zugehörige Schrifte – Briefe (2001); Vol. 4, Politische Philosophie. Studien zum theologisch-politischen Problem (2010). The full series will also include Vol. 5, Über Tyrannis (2013) and Vol. 6, Gedanken über Machiavelli. Deutsche Erstübersetzung (2014).
• Leo Strauss: The Early Writings (1921–1932). (Trans. from parts of Gesammelte Schriften). Trans. Michael Zank. Albany: SUNY Press, 2002.
• Die Religionskritik Spinozas als Grundlage seiner Bibelwissenschaft: Untersuchungen zu Spinozas Theologisch-politischem Traktat. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1930.
  • Spinoza’s Critique of Religion. (English trans. by Elsa M. Sinclair of Die Religionskritik Spinozas, 1930.) With a new English preface and a trans. of Strauss's 1932 German essay on Carl Schmitt. New York: Schocken, 1965. Reissued without that essay, Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997.
• "Anmerkungen zu Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen". Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 67, no. 6 (August–September 1932): 732–49.
  • "Comments on Carl Schmitt's Begriff des Politischen". (English trans. by Elsa M. Sinclair of "Anmerkungen zu Carl Schmitt", 1932.) 331–51 in Spinoza's Critique of Religion, 1965. Reprinted in Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, ed. and trans. George Schwab. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers U Press, 1976.
  • "Notes on Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political". (English trans. by J. Harvey Lomax of "Anmerkungen zu Carl Schmitt", 1932.) In Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue, trans. J. Harvey Lomax. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. Reprinted in Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, ed. and trans. George Schwab. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996, 2007.
• Philosophie und Gesetz: Beiträge zum Verständnis Maimunis und seiner Vorläufer. Berlin: Schocken, 1935.
  • Philosophy and Law: Essays Toward the Understanding of Maimonides and His Predecessors. (English trans. by Fred Baumann of Philosophie und Gesetz, 1935.) Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1987.
  • Philosophy and Law: Contributions to the Understanding of Maimonides and His Predecessors. (English trans. with introd. by Eve Adler of Philosophie und Gesetz, 1935.) Albany: SUNY Press, 1995.
• The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis. (English trans. by Elsa M. Sinclair from German manuscript.) Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936. Reissued with new preface, Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1952.
  • Hobbes' politische Wissenschaft in ihrer Genesis. (1935 German original of The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, 1936.) Neuwied am Rhein: Hermann Luchterhand, 1965.
• "The Spirit of Sparta or the Taste of Xenophon". Social Research 6, no. 4 (Winter 1939): 502–36.
• "On German Nihilism" (1999, originally a 1941 lecture), Interpretation 26, no. 3 edited by David Janssens and Daniel Tanguay.
• "On a New Interpretation of Plato’s Political Philosophy". Social Research 13, no. 3 (Fall 1946): 326–67.
• "On the Intention of Rousseau". Social Research 14, no. 4 (Winter 1947): 455–87.
• On Tyranny: An Interpretation of Xenophon's Hiero. Foreword by Alvin Johnson. New York: Political Science Classics, 1948. Reissued Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1950.
  • De la tyrannie. (French trans. of On Tyranny, 1948, with "Restatement on Xenophon's Hiero" and Alexandre Kojève's "Tyranny and Wisdom".) Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1954.
  • On Tyranny. (English edition of De la tyrannie, 1954.) Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1963.
  • On Tyranny. (Revised and expanded edition of On Tyranny, 1963.) Includes Strauss–Kojève correspondence. Ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth. New York: The Free Press, 1991.
• "On Collingwood’s Philosophy of History". Review of Metaphysics 5, no. 4 (June 1952): 559–86.
• Persecution and the Art of Writing. Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1952. Reissued Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988.
• Natural Right and History. (Based on the 1949 Walgrene lectures.) Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1953. Reprinted with new preface, 1971. ISBN 978-0-226-77694-1.
• Thoughts on Machiavelli. Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1958. Reissued Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978.
• What Is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies. Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1959. Reissued Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1988.
• On Plato's Symposium [1959]. Ed. Seth Benardete. (Edited transcript of 1959 lectures.) Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001.
• " 'Relativism' ". 135–57 in Helmut Schoeck and James W. Wiggins, eds., Relativism and the Study of Man. Princeton: D. Van Nostrand, 1961. Partial reprint, 13–26 in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, 1989.
• History of Political Philosophy. Co-editor with Joseph Cropsey. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1963 (1st ed.), 1972 (2nd ed.), 1987 (3rd ed.).
• "The Crisis of Our Time", 41–54, and "The Crisis of Political Philosophy", 91–103, in Howard Spaeth, ed., The Predicament of Modern Politics. Detroit: U of Detroit P, 1964.
  • "Political Philosophy and the Crisis of Our Time". (Adaptation of the two essays in Howard Spaeth, ed., The Predicament of Modern Politics, 1964.) 217–42 in George J. Graham, Jr., and George W. Carey, eds., The Post-Behavioral Era: Perspectives on Political Science. New York: David McKay, 1972.
• The City and Man. (Based on the 1962 Page-Barbour lectures.) Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964.
• Socrates and Aristophanes. New York: Basic Books, 1966. Reissued Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980.
• Liberalism Ancient and Modern. New York: Basic Books, 1968. Reissued with foreword by Allan Bloom, 1989. Reissued Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.
• Xenophon's Socratic Discourse: An Interpretation of the Oeconomicus. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1970.
• Xenophon's Socrates. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1972.
• The Argument and the Action of Plato's Laws. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1975.
• Political Philosophy: Six Essays by Leo Strauss. Ed. Hilail Gilden. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1975.
  • An Introduction to Political Philosophy: Ten Essays by Leo Strauss. (Expanded version of Political Philosophy: Six Essays by Leo Strauss, 1975.) Ed. Hilail Gilden. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1989.
• Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy. Introd. by Thomas L. Pangle. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983.
• The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism: An Introduction to the Thought of Leo Strauss – Essays and Lectures by Leo Strauss. Ed. Thomas L. Pangle. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989.
• Faith and Political Philosophy: the Correspondence Between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, 1934–1964. Ed. Peter Emberley and Barry Cooper. Introd. by Thomas L. Pangle. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State UP, 1993.
• Hobbes's Critique of Religion and Related Writings. Ed. and trans. Gabriel Bartlett and Svetozar Minkov. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2011. (Trans. of materials first published in the Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 3, including an unfinished manuscript by Leo Strauss of a book on Hobbes, written in 1933–1934, and some shorter related writings.)

Writings about Maimonides and Jewish philosophy

• Spinoza's Critique of Religion (see above, 1930).
• Philosophy and Law (see above, 1935).
• "Quelques remarques sur la science politique de Maïmonide et de Farabi". Revue des Etudes juives 100 (1936): 1–37.
• "Der Ort der Vorsehungslehre nach der Ansicht Maimunis". Monatschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums 81 (1936): 448–56.
• "The Literary Character of The Guide for the Perplexed" [1941]. 38–94 in Persecution and the Art of Writing. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1952.
• "How to Study Medieval Philosophy" [1944]. Interpretation 23, no. 3 (Spring 1996): 319–338. Previously published, less annotations and fifth paragraph, as "How to Begin to Study Medieval Philosophy" in Pangle (ed.), The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, 1989 (see above).
• "Progress or Return?" [1952]. Modern Judaism 1, no. 1 (May 1981): 17–45. Reprinted Chap. 1 (I–II) in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, 1997 (see below).
• "The Mutual Influence of Theology and Philosophy" [1952]. Independent Journal of Philosophy 3 (1979), 111–18. Reprinted Chap. 1 (III) in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, 1997 (see below).
• "Maimonides' Statement on Political Science". Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 22 (1953): 115–30.
• "On the Interpretation of Genesis" [1957]. L'Homme 21, n° 1 (janvier–mars 1981): 5–20. Reprinted Chap. 8 in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, 1997 (see below).
• "How to Begin to Study The Guide of the Perplexed". In The Guide of the Perplexed, Volume One. Trans. Shlomo Pines. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1963.
• "On the Plan of the Guide of the Perplexed" [1965]. Harry Austryn Wolfson Jubilee. Volume (Jerusalem: American Academy for Jewish Research), pp. 775–91.
• "Notes on Maimonides' Book of Knowledge". 269–83 in Studies in Mysticism and Religion Presented to G. G. Scholem. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1967.
• Maïmonide. Ed. Rémi Brague. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988.
• Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought. Ed. Kenneth Hart Green. Albany: SUNY P, 1997.

Works about Leo Strauss[link]

• "A Giving of Accounts". In Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity – Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought. Ed. Kenneth H. Green. Albany: SUNY Press, 1997.
• Altman, William H. F., The German Stranger: Leo Strauss and National Socialism. Lexignton Books, 2011
• Benardete, Seth. Encounters and Reflections: Conversations with Seth Benardete. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002.
• Bloom, Allan. "Leo Strauss". 235–55 in Giants and Dwarfs: Essays 1960–1990. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990.
• Bluhm, Harald. Die Ordnung der Ordnung : das politische Philosophieren von Leo Strauss. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2002.
• Brague, Rémi. "Leo Strauss and Maimonides". 93–114 in Leo Strauss's Thought. Ed. Alan Udoff. Boulder: Lynne Reiner, 1991.
• Brittain, Christopher Craig. "Leo Strauss and Resourceful Odysseus: Rhetorical Violence and the Holy Middle". Canadian Review of American Studies 38, no. 1 (2008): 147–63.
• Bruell, Christopher. "A Return to Classical Political Philosophy and the Understanding of the American Founding". Review of Politics 53, no. 1 (Winter 1991): 173–86.
• Deutsch, Kenneth L. and John A. Murley, eds. Leo Strauss, the Straussians, and the American Regime. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999. ISBN 978-0-8476-8692-6.
• Drury, Shadia B. Leo Strauss and the American Right. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999.
• ———. The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988.
• Gottfried, Paul. Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America: A Critical Appraisal (Cambridge University Press; 2011) 182 pages
• Gourevitch, Victor. "Philosophy and Politics I–II". Review of Metaphysics 22, nos. 1–2 (September–December 1968): 58–84, 281–328.
• Green, Kenneth. Jew and Philosopher – The Return to Maimonides in the Jewish Thought of Leo Strauss. Albany: SUNY Press, 1993.
• Holmes, Stephen. The Anatomy of Antiliberalism. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996. ISBN 978-0-674-03185-2.
• Ivry, Alfred L. "Leo Strauss on Maimonides". 75–91 in Leo Strauss’s Thought. Ed. Alan Udoff. Boulder: Lynne Reiner, 1991.
• Janssens, David. Between Athens and Jerusalem. Philosophy, Prophecy, and Politics in Leo Strauss's Early Thought. Albany: SUNY Press, 2008.
• Kartheininger, Markus. "Heterogenität. Politische Philosophie im Frühwerk von Leo Strauss". München: Fink, 2006. ISBN 978-3-7705-4378-6.
• Kartheininger, Markus. "Aristokratisierung des Geistes". In: Kartheininger, Markus/ Hutter, Axel (ed.). "Bildung als Mittel und Selbstzweck". Freiburg: Alber, 2009, p. 157-208. ISBN 978-3-495-48393-0.
• Kinzel, Till. Platonische Kulturkritik in Amerika. Studien zu Allan Blooms The Closing of the American Mind. Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 2002.
• Kochin, Michael S. "Morality, Nature, and Esotericism in Leo Strauss’s Persecution and the Art of Writing". Review of Politics 64, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 261–83.
• Lampert, Laurence. Leo Strauss and Nietzsche. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.
• Macpherson, C. B. "Hobbes’s Bourgeois Man". In Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972.
• McAllister, Ted V. Revolt Against Modernity : Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin & the Search for Postliberal Order. Lawrence, KS: UP of Kansas. 1996.
• McWilliams, Wilson Carey. "Leo Strauss and the Dignity of American Political Thought". Review of Politics 60, no. 2 (Spring 1998): 231–46.
• Meier, Heinrich. Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue, Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.
• ———. "Editor's Introduction[s]". Gesammelte Schriften. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1996–. 3 vols.
• ———. Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006.
• ———. How Strauss Became Strauss". 363–82 in Enlightening Revolutions: Essays in Honor of Ralph Lerner. Ed. Svetozar Minkov. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006.
• Melzer, Arthur. "Esotericism and the Critique of Historicism". American Political Science Review 100 (2006): 279–95.
• Minowitz, Peter. "Machiavellianism Come of Age? Leo Strauss on Modernity and Economics". The Political Science Reviewer 22 (1993): 157–97.
• ———. Straussophobia: Defending Leo Strauss and Straussians against Shadia Drury and Other Accusers. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009.
• Momigliano, Arnaldo. "Hermeneutics and Classical Political Thought in Leo Strauss", 178–89 in Essays on Ancient and Modern Judaism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994.
• Neumann, Harry. Liberalism. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic P, 1991.
• Norton, Anne. Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire. New Haven & London: Yale UP, 2004.
• Pangle, Thomas L. "The Epistolary Dialogue Between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin". Review of Politics 53, no. 1 (Winter 1991): 100–25.
• ———. "Leo Strauss’s Perspective on Modern Politics". Perspectives on Political Science 33, no. 4 (Fall 2004): 197–203.
• ———. Leo Strauss: An Introduction to His Thought and Intellectual Legacy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2006.
• Pelluchon, Corine. Leo Strauss: une autre raison d'autres Lumieres; Essai sur la crise de la rationalite contemporaine. Paris: J. Vrin, 2005.
• Piccinini, Irene Abigail. Una guida fedele. L'influenza di Hermann Cohen sul pensiero di Leo Strauss. Torino: Trauben, 2007. ISBN 978-88-89909-31-7.
• Rosen, Stanley. "Hermeneutics as Politics". 87–140 in Hermeneutics as Politics, New York: Oxford UP, 1987.
• Sheppard, Eugene R. Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile: The Making of a Political Philosopher. Waltham, MA: Brandeis UP, 2006. ISBN 978-1-58465-600-5.
• Shorris, Earl. "Ignoble Liars: Leo Strauss, George Bush, and the Philosophy of Mass Deception". Harper's Magazine 308, issue 1849 (June 2004): 65–71.
• Smith, Steven B. Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006. ISBN 978-0-226-76402-3. (Introd: "Why Strauss, Why Now?", online posting, press.uchicago.edu.)
• Smith, Steven B. (editor). The Cambridge Companion to Leo Strauss. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. ISBN 978-0-521-70399-4.
• Tanguay, Daniel. Leo Strauss: une biographie intellectuelle. Paris, 2005. ISBN 978-2-253-13067-3.
• Tarcov, Nathan. "On a Certain Critique of 'Straussianism' ". Review of Politics 53, no. 1 (Winter 1991): 3–18.
• ———. "Philosophy and History: Tradition and Interpretation in the Work of Leo Strauss". Polity 16, no. 1 (Autumn 1983): 5–29.
• ——— and Thomas L. Pangle, "Epilogue: Leo Strauss and the History of Political Philosophy". 907–38 in History of Political Philosophy. Ed. Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey. 3rd ed. 1963; Chicago and London, U of Chicago P, 1987.
• Thompson, Bradley C. (with Yaron Brook). Neoconservatism. An Obituary for an Idea. Boulder/London: Paradigm Publishers, 2010. pp. 55–131. ISBN 978-1-59451-831-7.
• West, Thomas G. "Jaffa Versus Mansfield: Does America Have a Constitutional or a "Declaration of Independence" Soul?" Perspectives on Political Science 31, no. 4 (Fall 2002): 35–46.
• Xenos, Nicholas. Cloaked in virtue: Unveiling Leo Strauss and the Rhetoric of American Foreign Policy. New York, Routledge Press, 2008.
• Zuckert, Catherine H. Postmodern Platos. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.
• Zuckert, Catherine H., and Michael Zuckert. The Truth about Leo Strauss. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006.

Strauss Family[link]

• Lüders, Joachim and Ariane Wehner. Mittelhessen – eine Heimat für Juden? Das Schicksal der Familie Strauss aus Kirchhain. Marburg: Gymnasium Philippinum, 1989. (In German; English translation: Central Hesse – a Homeland for Jews? The Fate of the Strauss Family from Kirchhain.)

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Leo Strauss

General resources[link]

• The Leo Strauss Center
• Audio of Leo Strauss lecture on Plato's 'Meno' – The Leo Strauss Center website.
• Claremont Institute For the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy – Claremont Institute website. (Includes a search facility.)
• Audio of 1958 lecture by Leo Strauss on Genesis
• The Leo Strauss Center

Scholarly articles, books, and parts of books (online)[link]

• Altman, William H. F. Altruism and the Art of Writing: Plato, Cicero, and Leo Strauss, Humanitas Spring-Fall, 2009
• Batnitzky, Leora. Leo Strauss, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).
• Brague, Rémi. Athens, Jerusalem, Mecca: Leo Strauss's "Muslim" Understanding of Greek Philosophy, Poetics Today 19.2 (Summer 1998): 235–59.
• Drury, Shadia B. "Leo Strauss and the Neoconservatives". Evatt Foundation, September 11, 2004.
• ———. "The Esoteric Philosophy of Leo Strauss", Political Theory 13, no. 3 (Aug 1985): 315–337.
• ———. "Leo Strauss and the Grand Inquisitor". Free Inquiry 24, no. 4 (June 2004).
• ———. "Strauss, Leo (1899–1973)". Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (New York: Routledge, 1998). Accessed October 5, 2007.
• George, Jim. "Leo Strauss, Neoconservatism and US Foreign Policy: Esoteric Nihilism and the Bush Doctrine". International Politics 42, no. 2 (June 2005): 174–202.
• Gottfried, Paul. "Strauss and the Straussians". Humanitas 18.1&2 (2005): 26–29.
• Levine, Peter. "A 'Right' Nietzschean: Leo Strauss and his Followers". 152–67 in Nietzsche and the Modern Crisis of the Humanities. Albany: SUNY Press, 1995. Inc. notes to chap. 8: 260–65. (Published version of the author's Ph.D. dissertation; online posting on author's personal website, PeterLevine.ws.)
• Novak, David Leo Strauss and Judaism: Jerusalem and Athens Critically Revisited
• Perreau-Saussine, Emile. "Athéisme et politique". Critique n° 728–729 (Jan–Feb 2008): 121–35.
• Piccinini, Irene Abigail. "Leo Strauss and Hermann Cohen's "arch-enemy:" a quasi-Cohenian apology of Baruch Spinoza" The Journal of Textual Reasoning 3.1 (June 2004).
• Pippin, Robert B. "The Modern World of Leo Strauss". Political Theory 20.3 (August 1992): 448–72.
• Robertson, Neil G. (1998). "The Closing of the Early Modern Mind: Leo Strauss and Early Modern Political Thought". Animus 3. ISSN 1209-0689. http://www2.swgc.mun.ca/animus/Articles/Volume%203/robert3.pdf. Retrieved August 18, 2011. 
• Ryn, Claes G. "Leo Strauss and History: The Philosopher As Conspirator". Humanitas 18.1&2 (2005): 31–58.
• Smith, Gregory Bruce. "Leo Strauss and the Straussians: An Anti-Democratic Cult?" Political Science and Politics 30.2 (June 1997): 180–89.
• Verskin, Alan. "Reading Strauss on Maimonides: A New Approach". Journal of Textual Reasoning 3, no. 1 (June 2004).
• West, Thomas G. "Jaffa Versus Mansfield: Does America Have a Constitutional or a 'Declaration of Independence' Soul?" Perspectives on Political Science 31 (September 2002). "Jaffa Versus Mansfield". ("What were the original principles of the American Constitution? Are those principles true?") Online posting. The Claremont Institute, November 29, 2002. Accessed June 1, 2007.
• Xenos, Nicholas. "Leo Strauss and the Rhetoric of the War on Terror". Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture 3.2 (Spring 2004): 1–19. (Printable PDF.)
• Zuckert, Catherine, and Michael Zuckert. "Introduction: Mr. Strauss Goes to Washington?" 1–26 in The Truth about Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy and American Democracy. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006. ISBN 978-0-226-99332-4. Online posting of "Excerpt" (1–20), www.press.uchicago.edu. (Book website updated May 21, 2007. Accessed June 1, 2007.)

Related journalistic commentary, other articles, and parts of books (online)[link]

• Ashbrook, Tom, with guests Harvey Mansfield, Shadia B. Drury, and Jack Beatty. "Leo Strauss and the American Right". On Point. WBUR Radio (Boston, Massachusetts), May 15, 2003. Accessed May 26, 2007. (Interviews. Inc. audio link to radio program.)
• Barry, Tom. "Leo Strauss and Intelligence Strategy". International Relations Center, February 12, 2004. Accessed June 1, 2007.
• Berkowitz, Peter. What Hath Strauss Wrought? Weekly Standard, June 2, 2003.
• Cronkrite, Al. "Judeo-Christian Decadence at the Fount of Power". EtherZone, May 15, 2003.
• Doliner, Michael. Book Review: Leo Strauss and the American Right. Swans.com, October 10, 2005.
• Drury, Shadia B., and Matthew Rothschild. "Political Ideas of Leo Strauss". Interview of Shadia Drury. Progressive Radio (2005).
• Drury, Shadia B., and Michael Enright. "The New Machiavelli: Leo Strauss and the Politics of Fear". Interview of Shadia Drury. CBC, April 27, 2005.
• Englander, Julie. "Defending Strauss".
• Franchon, Alain, and Daniel Vernet. "The Strategist and the Philosopher: Leo Strauss and Albert Wohlstetter". Trans. (for CounterPunch) Norman Madarasz. Online posting. CounterPunch. June 2, 2003. Originally published in French. Le Monde, April 16, 2003. Rpt. with permission.
• Goldstein, Yoni. "A Platonic Love Affair: Strauss in the White House". Moment (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor undergraduate student publication), Issue 3 (February–March 2004). Cf. Critical Moment; issue 3 of the previous series, entitled Moment (on "Empire"), is not currently available online. (This article was written by an undergraduate student.)
• Hersh, Seymour M. "Selective Intelligence". The New Yorker, May 12, 2003. Accessed June 1, 2007.
• Horton, Scott. “Straussophobia: Six Questions for Peter Minowitz,” Harper’s Magazine, 9/29/09,^[1]
• "Leo Strauss". SourceWatch (A project of the Center for Media and Democracy), November 14, 2006. Accessed June 1, 2007.
• Leupp, Gary. "The Philosopher Kings: Leo Strauss and the Neocons". CounterPunch, May 24, 2003.
• Lobe, Jim. "Leo Strauss' Philosophy of Deception", Alternet, May 2003.
• Madarasz, Norman. "Behind the Neocon Curtain: Plato, Leo Strauss & Allan Bloom". CounterPunch, June 2, 2003.
• McBryde, David. "Leo Strauss". N.d. Accessed June 1, 2007. (Self-published essay posted on author's website.)
• Pfaff, William. The Long Reach of Leo Strauss, International Herald Tribune, May 15, 2003.
• Shulsky, Abram N., and Gary J. Schmitt. "Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence (By Which We Do Not Mean Nous)". Originally published in Leo Strauss, the Straussians, and the American Regime. Ed. Kenneth L. Deutsch and John A. Murley. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999. Rpt. Sic Semper Tyrannis 2007 (personal blog of W. Patrick Lang.) N.d. Accessed June 1, 2007.
• Silva, Jim. "Strauss and the Neocon Takeover". The Lompoc Record, February 6, 2006.
• Skidelsky, Edward. "No More Heroes". Prospect, March 2006.
• Wolin, Richard. "Leo Strauss, Judaism, and Liberalism". The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 14, 2006. Accessed May 22, 2007.
• Xenos, Nicholas. Leo Strauss and the Rhetoric of the War on Terror

Eustace Clarence Mullins, Jr. (March 9, 1923 – February 2, 2010)^[1] was a populist American political writer, biographer, and antisemite.^{[2][3][4][5][6][7][8]} His most famous work was The Secrets of The Federal Reserve. Along with Nesta Webster, he is generally regarded as one of the most influential authors in the genre of conspiracism.

Biography[link]

Eustace Clarence Mullins, Jr. was born in Roanoke, Virginia, the third child of Eustace Clarence Mullins (1899–1961) and his wife Jane Katherine Muse (1897–1971). His father was a salesman in a retail clothing store.

Eustace Mullins was educated at Washington and Lee University, New York University, the University of North Dakota and the Institute of Contemporary Arts (Washington, D.C.)

In December 1942, at Charlottesville, Virginia he enlisted in the military as a Warrant Officer. He was also a veteran of the United States Air Force, with thirty-eight months active service during World War II.

Mullins frequently visited poet Ezra Pound during his period of incarceration in St. Elizabeths Hospital for the Mentally Ill in Washington, D.C. between 1946 and 1959. According to Mullins it was Pound who set him on the course of research that led to his writing The Secrets of The Federal Reserve^[9]

Mullins was a researcher at the Library of Congress in 1950 and cooperated with Senator Joseph McCarthy in trying to discover who financed the Communist Party. He later stated that he believed McCarthy had "started to turn the tide against world communism".^[10] Shortly after his first book came out in 1952, he was discharged by the Library of Congress.^[11]

In the 1950s, Mullins wrote for Conde McGinley’s newspaper Common Sense, which promoted the second edition of his book on the Federal Reserve, entitled The Federal Reserve Conspiracy (1954). Around this time, he also wrote for Lyrl Clark Van Hyning's Chicago-based newsletter, Women's Voice. In 1995, he was writing for Criminal Politics.^[12] Around the end of his life, he would write for Willis Carto's magazine Barnes Review.

Mullins lived in Staunton, Virginia, in the house on Madison Place where he grew up, from the mid 1970s through the end of his life.^[13]

Writings[link]

In his Foreword to The Secrets of the Federal Reserve Mullins explains the circumstances by which he came to write his now famous investigation into the origins of the Federal Reserve System:

In 1949, while I was visiting Ezra Pound who was a political prisoner at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, Washington, D.C. (a Federal institution for the insane), Dr. Pound asked me if I had ever heard of the Federal Reserve System. I replied that I had not, as of the age of 25. He then showed me a ten dollar bill marked "Federal Reserve Note" and asked me if I would do some research at the Library of Congress on the Federal Reserve System which had issued this bill. Pound was unable to go to the Library himself, as he was being held without trial as a political prisoner by the United States government. After he was denied broadcasting time in the U.S., Dr. Pound broadcast from Italy in an effort to persuade people of the United States not to enter World War II. Franklin D. Roosevelt had personally ordered Pound’s indictment...^[14]

After telling Pound that he had little interest in such a research project because he was working on a novel,

Pound offered to supplement my income by ten dollars a week for a few weeks. My initial research revealed evidence of an international banking group which had secretly planned the writing of the Federal Reserve Act and Congress’ enactment of the plan into law. These findings confirmed what Pound had long suspected. He said, "You must work on it as a detective story."^[15]

Mullins completed the manuscript during the course of 1950 when he began to seek a publisher. Eighteen publishers turned the book down without comment before the President of the Devin-Adair Publishing Company, Devin Garrett, told him, "I like your book but we can't print it...Neither can anybody else in New York. You may as well forget about getting the [...] book published."^[16]

Eventually the book was published by two of Pound's disciples, John Kasper and David Horton, under the title Mullins on the Federal Reserve.

In Mullins on the Federal Reserve (1952), (the updated edition published in 1983 was called Secrets of the Federal Reserve) Mullins argued that there was a conspiracy among Paul Warburg, Edward Mandell House, Woodrow Wilson, J.P. Morgan, Benjamin Strong, Otto Kahn, the Rockefeller family, the Rothschild family, and other European and American bankers which resulted in the founding of the U.S. Federal Reserve System. He argued that the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 defies Article 1, Section 8, Paragraph 5 of the United States Constitution by creating a "central bank of issue" for the United States. Mullins went on to claim that World War I, the Agricultural Depression of 1920, the Great Depression of 1929 were brought about by international banking interests in order to profit from conflict and economic instability. Mullins also cited Thomas Jefferson's staunch opposition to the establishment of a central bank in the United States.

In the 1983 edition of his book, he argued that Kuhn, Loeb & Co. and the House of Morgan were fronts for the Rothschilds. In this edition, he also outlined how financial interests connected to the J. Henry Schroder Company and the Dulles brothers financed Adolf Hitler (in contrast to the claims of his mentor, Ezra Pound, that Hitler was a sovereign who was completely against the interests of international finance^[17] ). He also alleged that the Rothschilds were world monopolists. He furthermore claimed that most of the stock of member banks that owned stock in the Federal Reserve was owned by City of London bankers, since they owned much of the stock of the member banks. He attempted to trace stock ownership, as it changed hands via mergers and acquisitions, from the inception of the Federal Reserve in 1913 to the early 1980s.^[18]

In the last chapter of the book, he noted various Congressional investigations, and criticized the immense degree of power that these few banks who owned majority shares in the Federal Reserve possessed. He also criticized the Bilderberg Group, attacking it as an international consortium produced by the Rockefeller-Rothschild alliance. In an appendix to the book, he delved further into the City of London, and criticized the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, which he claimed helps to conduct psychological warfare on the citizens of Britain and the United States.

A central theme of Mullins' book is that the Federal Reserve allows bankers to monetize debt, creating it out of nothing by book entry, and thus they have enormous leverage over everyone else. Near the end of the book, he said of the Federal Reserve:

The Federal Reserve System is not Federal; it has no reserves; and it is not a system, but rather, a criminal syndicate. It is the product of criminal syndicalist activity of an international consortium of dynastic families comprising what the author terms "The World Order". The Federal Reserve system is a central bank operating in the United States. Although the student will find no such definition of a central bank in the textbooks of any university, the author has defined a central bank as follows: It is the dominant financial power of the country which harbors it. It is entirely private-owned, although it seeks to give the appearance of a governmental institution. It has the right to print and issue money, the traditional prerogative of monarchs. It is set up to provide financing for wars. It functions as a money monopoly having total power over all the money and credit of the people.

Eustace Mullins dedicated Secrets of the Federal Reserve to George Stimpson and Ezra Pound.

Mullins wrote a follow up to his work on the Federal Reserve in 1985, in a book called The World Order: A Study in the Hegemony of Parasitism,^[19] updated in 1992 as The World Order: Our Secret Rulers. He argued that the Federal Reserve and other central banks were tools of a "Rothschild World system", centered in the City of London, which extended its power through organizations like the Royal Institute of International Affairs, various foundations, corporate conglomerates, intelligence agencies, etc. He proposed that Nations were not really governing powers, but rather, that the world was parasitically controlled by this interlock of banks, foundations, and corporations, which acted as a unified force, tending towards World monopoly. He furthermore proposed that this oligarchical apparatus was controlled by corrupt, dynastic families that had accumulated their wealth through trade in gold, slaves, and drugs. He claimed that as this consortium furthered its monopolistic ambitions, it would seek the establishment of a World Culture, eradicate nationalism, impoverish everyone except themselves, and progressively turn the world into a police state.

In 1985, Mullins also wrote A Writ for Martyrs, in which he reproduced a large portion of his FBI file, which included a 1959 memo to J. Edgar Hoover from Alex Rosen, which suggested having Mullins forcibly committed for his political views. On this memo is a scribbled note from Hoover, saying the Mullins case was “top priority” and that FBI agents should “see that some action is taken.” It also produced facsimiles of his correspondence with the German and American governments regarding the burning of the German translation of his study of the Federal Reserve.

In 1988, Mullins wrote Murder by Injection, where he argued that much of the United States was controlled by the Rockefellers, and that the "medical monopoly" exercised a pernicious influence on American life, intentionally making people sick and deliberately introducing poisons, rather than healing people.

In 1989, Mullins wrote The Rape of Justice, where he argued that the United States legal system was fundamentally corrupt.

Antisemitism[link]

This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (February 2011)

Many of Mullins' writings show a preoccupation with the idea that the Jews of the world are in a state of war with Christianity and Western civilization, and that Communism, Zionism, and International finance were Jewish tools to subjugate gentile populations. He also believed that in general the interaction between Jews and gentiles was parasitic. He believed that gentiles like the Rockefellers were also parasitic, but that ultimately the World Order was controlled by Jews and that the end goal of this Jewish oligarchy is "World Zionism."^{[citation needed]}

He believed that the French Revolution and the Congress of Vienna were key events in which Jews, via conspiratorial machinations, overpowered Gentile governments.^{[citation needed]} He believed that other key moments in the establishment of Jewish power were the creation of the Federal Reserve, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the establishment of the state of Israel.^{[citation needed]}

Like Pound, he had sympathy for Fascism, because of its apparent anti-Usury and anti-Communist measures, though he later withdrew that sympathy, as he came to believe that without the Nazis, Zionism would never have been a powerful force, and that the Nazis were puppets of Jewish bankers, specifically Max Warburg, who he claimed financed them to build up the Nazi war machine, as well as the leaders of the J. Henry Schroeder Bank, who were facilitated by the Dulles brothers, and that Nazi opposition to these bankers, insofar as it went beyond rhetoric, occurred only well after they had ascended to power. In his book Secrets of the Federal Reserve, he also claimed that World War One was contrived and managed by a triumvirate consisting of Paul Warburg, Bernard Baruch, Eugene Meyer, and to a lesser extent, the leaders of Morgan banks, in the United States, and men like Max Warburg in Germany, so that they might increase their profit and power. He also claimed that these individuals would play a key role in financing the Bolshevik Revolution.^{[citation needed]}

His October, 1952 article "Adolf Hitler: An Appreciation" was mentioned in a report by the House Un-American Activities Committee.^[20] In it, he espoused anti-Semitic views and expressed the belief that America owes a debt to Hitler.^{[citation needed]}

In a tract called The Secret Holocaust, Mullins stated that the account of the Nazi extermination of the Jews is implausible, and that it is a cover story for the Soviet massacres of Christians, which he believed was led by a conspiracy of "international Jews" and instigated for the purpose of killing Gentiles.^{[citation needed]}

In 1968, Mullins authored the tract, The Biological Jew, which he claimed was an "objective" analysis of the forces behind the "decline" of Western Culture. He claimed that the main influence that people were overlooking in their analysis of world affairs was "parasitism". He began by describing parasitism in the animal kingdom. He then commented on the work of the macro-historians Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee (who he said was a ripoff of Spengler and a "shabbez-goi historian"), and proposed that if we look at society as if it were an organism, then the Jews would be equivalent to parasites overtaking that organism. He states that Jews "instinctively" want to control the world. He spent the rest of the book attacking Americans for their supposed docility and subservience to the Jews, and predicting that America would be in total cultural decline by the 1980s.^{[citation needed]}

Michael Barkun describes Mullins' 1992 work The New World Order: Our Secret Rulers as "a more openly anti-Semitic version of the Illuminati theory". He writes:

Like his mentor [Ezra Pound], Mullins sees the world's evil as a product of financial manipulation, in which Jews play a central role. But as an explanation of world, as opposed to modern, history, his conspiracist vision makes the Illuminati merely a link in a much longer change that extends back to the ancient Near East and forward to the nascent communist movement of the early Marx. Weishaupt himself is portrayed as a mere figurehead... Mullins sees the Illuminati as really run by Jews...".^[8]

Death[link]

While on a speaking tour in Columbus, Ohio in January 2010, Mullins suffered a stroke. He died on February 2, 2010, aged 86, in Hockley, Texas.

Works[link]

Books[link]

• The Curse of Canaan: A Demonology of History, Revelation Books, Staunton, Virginia, 1987, 242 pages, ISBN 0-9786517-1-5 (2007)
• The Federal Reserve Conspiracy, Common Sense, Union, New Jersey, 1954, 144 pages
• Mullins' New History of the Jews, The International Institute of Jewish Studies, Staunton, Virginia, 1978, reprint of 1968 edition. Quoting from the introduction: "... throughout the history of civilization, one particular problem of mankind has remained constant. In all of the vast records of peace and wars and rumors of wars, one great empire after another has had to come to grips with the same dilemma ... the Jews."
• Murder by Injection: The Medical Conspiracy Against America, The National Council for Medical Research, Staunton, Virginia, ISBN 0-88060-694-0
• My Life in Christ, Faith and Service Books, Aryan League of America Staunton, Virginia, 1968, 90 pages
• The Rape of Justice: America's Tribunals Exposed, Staunton, Virginia: National Commission for Judicial Reform, 1989
• The Secret History of the Atomic Bomb
• The Secrets of the Federal Reserve, 1952. Reprinted John McLaughlin, 1983, 208 pages, ISBN 0-9656492-1-0
• The Sedition Case, Sons Of Liberty, 1985, Metairie, Louisiana, 1985, Trade Paperback
• This Difficult Individual: Ezra Pound, Fleet Publishing Corporation, (1961) reprint, Noontide Press, ISBN 0-317-53248-0
• This Difficult Individual: Ezra Pound, Angriff Press: Hollywood, California, 1961. With black & white photos of Ezra Pound taken while incarcerated, 388 pages, cloth reprint (exactly as Fleet Press edition; bootlegged?)
• War! War! War!, Sons of Liberty, 1984, ISBN 0-89562-100-2
• A Writ for Martyrs, OTU Christ Church, 1985, Soft Cover, 223 pages
• The World Order: A Study in the Hegemony of Parasitism, Staunton, Virginia: Ezra Pound Institute, 1985, 217 pages
• The World Order: Our Secret Rulers, Staunton, Virginia: Ezra Pound Institute, 1992, 294 pages

Pamphlets and other works[link]

• 27 Billion Dollar Rip Off; The Power Brokers
• America's New Robber Barons: Exclusive Report, pamphlet, 8 pages
• American Patriotism Means Loyalty to Israel, Says Jack, pamphlet, reprint, 2 pages
• Boycott: The Jewish Weapon
• Canada: A Financial Report For 1992
• The Celebration Of Rosh Hashanah
• The Coup That Never Was
• Criminals On Capitol Hill
• The Danger Of International Merger Mania
• The Day Is Here
• Death To The Peacemakers
• Easter
• Education For Death
• Education for Slavery
• Every Man A King
• FDR
• Federal Reserve Notes: Shackles Of Slavery
• General MacArthur The Man Who Refused to Lose
• Genocide In America
• George Sylvester Viereck: Roosevelt's Victim, pamphlet, 3 pages
• The Glorious Revolution, corner-stapled report, 4 pages
• The Hidden Hand Behind Televangelism
• The Holocaust Explained
• How The Media Is Manipulated
• How To Become A United States Senator
• Is There A New World Order?
• Jesse Jackson And The Jews'', corner-stapled report, 7 pages
• Jewish TV: Sick, Sick, Sick
• Jewish War Against The Western World
• Judges or Criminals?, pamphlet, 3 pages
• Khatyn Or Katyn?, pamphlet, 2 pages
• The Lindbergh Murders: Hauptman Was Innocent
• Marching through Georgia, pamphlet
• Murder
• Murder by Injection: The Great Swine Flu Massacre
• Murder On The Supreme Court
• New Israel
• New Look at Herzl, 2 pages, corner-stapled photocopied report. Reveals that Herzl's grandiose plans for Zionism resulted from VD.
• The New World Order
• None Dare Call Him Traitor: Larry Abraham The Israeli Connect, pamphlet, 8 pages
• Operation Desert Shield, corner-stapled report, 4 pages
• Our Identity
• The Plagues Of Pharaoh
• The Power Brokers Of Canada'
• Reagan's Final Surrender, corner-stapled report, 2 pages
• The Scandal Unveiled
• The Secret Holocaust, CPA Book Publishers, Boring, Oregon, small 34-page pamphlet
• Sigmund Freud: Anti-Christ Devil
• Supreme Court Burns Us Again
• The Trilaterals Are Back In The White House
• The Vietnam Wall
• The War Against Christianity
• There's A Gulag In Your Future
• Trotsky: Where Are You Now?
• The War Against Vietnam Veterans
• War Is The Only Way Out
• The Warburgs, An American Success Story, corner-stapled catalog, 7 pages.
• Warning: The Department Of Justice Is Dangerous To Americans
• Washington DC: City Of Fear
• What Are We Fighting To Preserve?
• What Made Sammy Run?: How Racial Hatred Creates Billion Dollar Fortunes, pamphlet, 10 pages
• Who Owns the TV Networks ?
• Why General Patton was Murdered, pamphlet, 4 pages
• You Can Stop the Threatened Depression!, leaflet, USA: Liberty Free Press, USA

Resources[link]

• 1900–1930 U.S. Federal Census
• World War I Draft Registration Card of Eustace Mullins, Jr.'s father
• World War II Military Enlistment Index

References[link]

External links[link]

• Eustace Mullins Memorial at Find A Grave

Hassan Abbasi (born in 1967) is an Iranian political analyst doctrinologist & strategist, the head of the Center for Doctrinal Analysis, an independent political strategic think-tank in the Islamic Republic and also counter-terrorism advanced study center.

Abassi claims to be a basiji of the Iran-Iraq war, and special forces.[1] However, his involvement in Iran-Iraq war (and claims of his volunteer efforts to defend Iran in war times), has bean disputed by General Ali Shamkhani (the Commander of IRGC Navy during the war). General Shamkhani has said: "If Hassan Abbasi and the likes of him would have come to the battleground, we wouldn't have shortage of forces, and the matter [result of the war] would have been different. He was not in the battleground." [2]

Abbasi calls himself a doctor, with a Ph.D. degree, but has always refused to clarify the university from which he graduated or his adviser. He even claims that he has supervised some Ph.D. dissertations, but it has not been confirmed by an independent source. [3][4] Answering questions about his Ph.D. he has said that "Doctorate means Doctrine, meaning someone who can offer Doctrine." [5]

Abbasi also has claimed that The New York Times writes about him "every week" and that the New York Times calls him "the Kissinger of Islam" and the "THE BIG BRAIN STRATEGIST". 'aftabnews' checked the online archive of The New York Times and didn't find any mention of Abbasi in any article. [6]