Leo Strauss — Natural Right, the Quarrel of Ancients and Moderns, and the Art of Esoteric Writing (1899–1973)

Leo Strauss was a German-Jewish political philosopher whose emigration to the United States in 1938 — fleeing a Nazi Germany whose catastrophe he had anticipated — led to a career at Chicago that made him the most influential and most contested political philosopher in American academia of the second half of the twentieth century: a scholar who taught Plato and Maimonides and Machiavelli as if they contained urgent responses to contemporary crisis, and whose students spread his methods and preoccupations across American political science and political philosophy.

A survivor of the Weimar Republic's collapse who had watched liberal democracy destroyed by the combination of nihilism and historicism — the twin diseases of modern thought that he spent his career diagnosing — his project was to recover the resources of classical political philosophy as a corrective to what he saw as the deepest philosophical crisis of modernity: the abandonment of the belief that there were objective standards of right and justice that reason could discover.

His central concern: that the crisis of liberal democracy had its deepest roots not in politics but in philosophy — in the modern rejection of natural right, in the historicist claim that all values were historically conditioned, in the positivist claim that values were merely subjective preferences — and that the remedy required a return to the ancients who had understood politics as the pursuit of the genuinely good life.

Natural Right and History — Against Relativism

Strauss's most widely read American work, "Natural Right and History" (1953), began with a pointed challenge: the opening sentences of the American Declaration of Independence — "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights" — asserted a doctrine of natural right that the dominant currents of twentieth century thought had made philosophically untenable. If the social scientists were right that all values were relative to historical and cultural position — if Max Weber's value-freedom doctrine was correct — then the Declaration's claim to assert self-evident truths was either naive or rhetorical.

Strauss's response was to trace the historical trajectory from ancient natural right — grounded in an objective understanding of human nature and the natural ends proper to it — through the distinctively modern versions of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, which had progressively lowered the ambitions of political philosophy from the pursuit of virtue and the best life to the protection of rights, security, and self-preservation. This descent had culminated, through Nietzsche and Heidegger, in the abandonment of any objective standard at all — and the political consequences had been visible in Weimar and beyond.

His diagnosis: the crisis was produced by philosophy, and only philosophy could address it. The return to natural right required returning to the ancients — to Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates — who had understood that there were objective standards of human excellence and political justice discoverable by philosophical reason.

"A social science that cannot speak of tyranny with the same confidence with which medicine speaks of cancer cannot understand the most important political phenomena."

Persecution and the Art of Writing — The Esoteric Tradition

Strauss's most methodologically distinctive contribution was his account of esoteric writing — developed in "Persecution and the Art of Writing" (1952) and applied throughout his interpretive work.

His claim: philosophers who wrote under conditions of persecution — whether religious intolerance, political tyranny, or the social pressure of majority opinion — could not safely express their true views in direct form. They therefore developed the art of writing between the lines: presenting a surface text acceptable to the authorities and the majority while embedding their true teaching in inconsistencies, careful placements, and deliberate contradictions that only the attentive philosophical reader would notice. This was not mere duplicity but a pedagogically responsible practice — protecting both the philosopher from persecution and the majority from truths they were not prepared to receive.

Applied to the history of philosophy, this method implied that the canonical texts had a depth that straightforward commentary missed — that Plato, Maimonides, and Alfarabi had said things between the lines that their exoteric teaching deliberately concealed. The method was enormously generative for Strauss's students and enormously controversial among his critics — who argued that it licensed reading anything into any text and that its esotericism about the esoteric made it unfalsifiable.

"An author who addresses a heterodox view to a wide audience, including its potential persecutors, must necessarily express his heterodox views in such a manner that he can, if need be, deny having meant them."

The Quarrel of Ancients and Moderns — Lowering the Horizon

The interpretive framework that organized all of Strauss's historical work was what he called the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns — a philosophical disagreement that began with Machiavelli and had never been resolved.

The ancients — Plato, Aristotle, the classical political philosophers — had understood politics as the pursuit of the genuinely good life, as the creation of conditions in which human beings could exercise virtue and achieve their natural excellences. The moderns — beginning with Machiavelli, continuing through Hobbes and Locke — had deliberately lowered the horizon of political philosophy, making its aims more "realistic": peace, security, material welfare, the protection of individual rights. This lowering was not a refinement but a loss — the abandonment of the highest human possibilities for the sake of more reliably achievable lower ones.

Machiavelli was the pivotal figure in Strauss's narrative — the first modern, the philosopher who had explicitly rejected the classical tradition's appeal to what human beings ought to be in favor of an analysis of what they actually were. "Thoughts on Machiavelli" (1958) was Strauss's most detailed case for reading Machiavelli as a fundamentally subversive figure — not a mere political realist but a teacher of evil who had decisively set Western civilization on the path toward modernity.

"Jerusalem and Athens — these are the two sources of our civilization. The quarrel between them, and within each of them, is the most important source of intellectual vitality in Western civilization."

The Straussian Legacy — Influence, Controversy, and Neoconservatism

Strauss's influence spread through an unusually devoted group of students — Allan Bloom, Harvey Mansfield, Harry Jaffa, Thomas Pangle — who carried his methods and preoccupations into American universities and, indirectly, into political life. The connection to neoconservatism, though frequently asserted, is more complicated than critics have claimed: Strauss himself focused on political philosophy rather than policy advocacy, and the connection is primarily one of educational pedigree rather than direct intellectual influence on specific policies.

His interpretive method generated a recognizable "Straussian" approach to philosophical texts — characterized by close reading, attention to structure and placement, skepticism toward anachronistic interpretation, and the search for a teaching between the lines — that influenced political theory, classics, and legal scholarship well beyond his direct students. Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind" (1987) brought a broadly Straussian cultural diagnosis to a wide popular audience.

Critics of Strauss have pressed several lines of objection: that his esotericism is unfalsifiable and licenses arbitrary readings; that his account of the ancients is idealized and historically inaccurate; that his critique of modernity romanticizes a past that had its own profound injustices; and that his influence on students who became political operatives suggests a troubling relationship between philosophy and political manipulation. Defenders respond that the criticisms often mistake his diagnoses for prescriptions and that his historical scholarship repays careful study regardless of one's conclusions about his politics.

"The life of a man in whose soul nothing lies waste — this is the simply good life, the life in which the requirements of man's natural inclinations are fulfilled in the proper order to the highest possible degree."

Legacy — The Philosopher Who Would Not Rest Easy with the Modern World

Strauss died in 1973, having spent his final years at St. John's College — a fitting location for a philosopher devoted to the great books — and was buried with a simplicity that matched the philosophical seriousness with which he had lived.

His importance to the catalogue of political philosophy is not in providing answers — his work is more diagnostic than prescriptive — but in the precision and force of its diagnosis: that liberal democracy's deepest problems were philosophical before they were political, and that the philosophical tradition contained resources for addressing them that the modern academic mainstream had been systematically trained to ignore. Whether one accepts his diagnosis or not, it is a genuinely serious challenge that demands engagement.

On CivSim he belongs alongside Bolingbroke, Hamann, and Russell Kirk — thinkers who found in the modern settlement not the end of political philosophy's questions but their suppression, and who insisted on reopening those questions even at the cost of being misunderstood as mere reactionaries. His challenge to Universal Humanism is the ancient one: that a politics organized around universal necessity may be meeting the condition of human flourishing while being silent about its content — about what a fully human life actually requires beyond the satisfaction of material needs.

"There is no adequate solution to the problem of virtue or happiness on the political or social plane — which is precisely why political philosophy can never be replaced by political science."