Nor did equality fare well as an ideal in the aftermath of the French Revolution. One twentieth-century writer, the Israeli historian Jacob Talmon, blamed the egalitarian thrust of the Revolution, and especially the ideas of Rousseau, for the totalitarian dictatorships of his time, while other thinkers who experienced those dictatorships at first hand, including Leo Strauss and the right-wing German philosopher Carl Schmitt, found it easier to defend secrecy, elitism, and dictatorship than to endorse anything resembling egalitarian principles.

But is the latter possibility to be dismissed out of hand? An interesting alternative is available to those readers who agree with Waterfield that the Republic has little to offer as a work of political philosophy, but who at the same time find the ethical reading – especially in Waterfield’s extreme formulation – ultimately unconvincing. The thesis is most closely associated with the twentieth-century American philosopher Leo Strauss, though it has been pursued by a number of others, most prominently Allan Bloom. In essence, it agrees that the Republic is a dialogue in which an authoritarian system of government is outlined, but contends that [Plato]’s purpose in doing so is ironic: the aim is to highlight the preposterousness of the just city.

To understand nature, human nature, and the imperatives of social life, it was essential to throw out this meaningless rubbish and begin on scientific foundations. No account that sees Hobbes as other than a secular, materialistic utilitarian is an account of Hobbes at all, which is why Leo Strauss’s attempt to present Hobbes’s science as a mere tarting-up of old-fashioned conceptions of the state as a remedy for sin just misses the point.

Today there are academic dogmas as well, such as those of the cultural Left, the Austrian school of economics, and the followers of Leo Strauss. Intellectuals, moreover, often flock together; in fact very few of them are truly untamable individualists in the tradition of Socrates, Thoreau, Nietzsche, Camus, and Orwell.

For Strauss, every philosopher at all times is in the situation of political persecution, and hence has to construct a specific way of writing, which on its surface is “exoteric,” that is, meant for the general, unsophisticated reader, yet is “esoteric” in its hidden message, accessible only to few “thoughtful” and “careful” readers capable of understanding the true message of and behind a text by “reading between the lines”. True philosophers, then, including Plato, “must conceal their opinions from all but philosophers, either by limiting themselves to oral instruction of a carefully selected group of pupils, or by writing about the most important subject by means of ‘brief indication’”.

But just how "sinister" was Leo Strauss himself? The answer depends on how a reader approaches his books. If you read Strauss with a well-disposed spirit, he can be interpreted as a genuine friend of American liberal democracy. He worked to create an elite that was strong, sober, and sufficiently free of illusions about the goodness of man to fight the totalitarian enemies of liberal democracy-be they fascists, communists, or Islamicist fundamentalists.But if you read Strauss with a skeptical mind, the way he himself read the great philosophers, a more disturbing picture takes shape. Strauss, by this view, emerges as a disguised Machiavelli, a cynical teacher who encouraged his followers to believe that their intellectual superiority entitles them to rule over the bulk of humanity by means of duplicity. The worst thing you can do to Leo Strauss, perhaps, is to read his books with Straussian eyes.

From Moses Hess to Martin Buber and Leo Baeck, Spinoza has great symbolic significance for the articulation of German Jewish identity. Leo Strauss’s Spinoza project is representative of the prominent place of Spinoza for Jewish self-understanding in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany.

In my opinion, the only serious attempt to “save” Americans from cultural relativism has come from the students of Leo Strauss.

Leo Strauss is professor of political philosophy in Chicago, highly respected. Wrote a good book about Hobbes (as well as the one about Spinoza). Now another about natural law. He is a convinced orthodox atheist. Very odd. A truly gifted intellect. I don't like him.

In 1938 Strauss moved to the United States, where after the war he occupied a chair at Chicago in the same period that Oakeshott was at the LSE. There he produced the remarkable series of works – in form, an oracular retrospect of the history of philosophy from Socrates to Nietzsche, in effect, a systematic political doctrine – which has since nurtured the most distinctive and strong-minded school of American conservatism. There were two principal themes in this oeuvre. A just political order must be grounded in immutable demands of natural right. Nature, however, is inherently unequal. The capacity to discover truth is restricted to a few, and to endure it exhibited by scarcely more. The best regime will therefore reflect differences in human excellence, and be led by an appropriate élite. But although the highest virtue is philosophical contemplation of the truth, this does not mean – contrary to a superficial reading of the Republic – that the just city will be ruled by philosophers. For philosophy gazes without faltering, not only at the necessary conditions of political order, discomfiting as these may be to demotic prejudice, but at the far more terrible realities of cosmic disorder: the absence of any divine authority, the delusion of any common morality, the transience of the earth and its species – every insight that religion must deny and society cannot survive. Unfolded at large, these truths would destroy the protective atmosphere of any civilisation and with it the conditions for the pursuit of philosophy itself. Esoteric wisdom and exoteric opinion must therefore remain distinct, on pain of mutual destruction. Leisured gentlemen instructed in rule – but not raised to truth – by philosophers should uphold a rational order of political stability against levelling temptations. Under their rule, theoretical knowledge could find institutional shelter, without dangerous side-effects on civic practice.