Pbk Ed.: Daniel Tanguay, LEO STRAUSS: AN INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY.

Tanguay, Daniel.  Leo Strauss: Une Biographie Intellectuelle.  Paris: Grasset et Fasquelle, 2003.  Leo Strauss: an Intellectual Biography.  Trans. Christopher Nadon.  New Haven: Yale UP, 2007.

Since political theorist Leo Strauss' death in 1973, American interpreters have heatedly debated his intellectual legacy. Daniel Tanguay recovers Strauss from the atmosphere of partisan debate that has dominated American journalistic, political, and academic discussions of his work. Tanguay offers in crystal-clear prose the first assessment of the whole of Strauss' thought, a daunting task owing to the vastness and scope of Strauss' writings. This comprehensive overview of Strauss' thought is indispensable for anyone seeking to understand his philosophy and legacy. Tanguay gives special attention to Strauss' little-known formative years, 1920-1938, during which the philosopher elaborated the theme of his research, what he termed the 'theological-political problem'. Tanguay shows the connection of this theme to other major elements in Strauss' thought, such as the Quarrel between the Ancients and Moderns, the return to classical natural right, the art of esoteric writing, and his critique of modernity. In so doing, the author approaches what is at the heart of Strauss' work: "God and Politics." Rescuing Strauss from polemics and ill-defined generalizations about his ideas, Tanguay provides instead an important and timely analysis of a major philosophical thinker of the twentieth century.

Visit: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300172109/ref=pe_143810_20165220_snp_dp#_.

Wurgaft, Benjamin Aldes. Review of William H. F. Altman, THE GERMAN STRANGER. NDPR (June 2011).

Altman, William H. F.  The German Stranger: Leo Strauss and National Socialism.  Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010.

According to William H.F. Altman, the German-Jewish historian of political philosophy Leo Strauss was "the secret theoretician of National Socialism" and almost a Nazi. Readers familiar with the "Strauss Wars" fought between Strauss's critics and defenders during the past decade may not be shocked: since 9/11 Strauss has been accused of being liberalism's worst foe and of being the secret (and thirty years posthumous) architect behind George W. Bush's foreign policy in Iraq and Afghanistan, so why not a secret Nazi philosopher as well? However, readers of Altman's The German Stranger: Leo Strauss and National Socialism will find far more than the simple charge that Strauss, who left Germany to pursue studies in France and England just before Hitler's rise to power, might have joined the Nazi Party if his Jewish heritage hadn't made that impossible. In the process of pressing his case Altman surveys Strauss's debts to German philosophers both Jewish (Moses Mendelssohn, Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig) and non- (Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger), provides an iconoclastic portrayal of Strauss -- usually portrayed as a defender of Platonism -- as an anti-Platonist, and casts Strauss as the titular "German stranger" who attempted to seduce American youths to an illiberal philosophy after his 1938 arrival on American shores. . . .

Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=23769.

Batnitzky, Leora. "Leo Strauss." STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY December 1, 2010.

Leo Strauss was a twentieth-century German Jewish émigré to the United States whose intellectual corpus spans ancient, medieval and modern political philosophy and includes, among others, studies of Plato, Maimonides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Nietzsche. Strauss wrote mainly as a historian of philosophy and most of his writings take the form of commentaries on important thinkers and their writings. Yet as he put it: “There is no inquiry into the history of philosophy that is not at the same time a philosophical inquiry” (PL, p. 41). While much of his philosophical project involved an attempt to rethink pre-modern philosophy, the impetus for this reconsideration and the philosophical problems that vexed Strauss most were decidedly modern. Strauss especially worried about the modern philosophical grounds for political and moral normativity as well as about the philosophical, theological, and political consequences of what he took to be modern philosophy's overinflated claims for the self-sufficiency of reason. . . .

Read the rest here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/strauss-leo/.

"Leo Strauss: Philosophy's Mystery Man." THE PHILOSOPHER'S ZONE July 31, 2010

According to some commentators, there was a mysterious, dark presence lurking behind the Bush administration. He was, said his critics, elitist, illiberal and anti-democratic. He encouraged American's leaders in imperialist militarism, neo-conservatism, Christian fundamentalism and the deliberate deception of those they led. And he did all this despite having died in 1973. He was Leo Strauss, professor of political science at the University of Chicago. But was this passionate student of classical philosophy really as dark a figure as all that?

Read / listen here: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/stories/2010/2965575.htm.

Chambers, Samuel A. Review of Stephen B. Smith, ed. CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO LEO STRAUSS. NDPR (June 2010).

Smith, Stephen B., ed. Cambridge Companion to Leo Strauss. Cambridge: CUP, 2009. Readers looking for a fight, or the next round of an on-going fight, will not find it here. And by "here" I mean to refer both to the book under review and this review itself. In just the past six years there have been at least a dozen books published on Strauss and Straussians, on the work of the thinker and on the politics of his putative influence over his students. A student of philosophy who somehow missed the entirety of the past decade might pick up Smith's collection of essays and see nothing more than a standard, rigorous academic treatment of a philosopher in the Cambridge Series. Yet anyone who has paid even scant attention to the recent literature would see something else as well: a careful and purposive choice to avoid rehashing the debate between, on the one hand, those who wish to draw the link between Strauss and neoconservatism and/or the Iraq War and, on the other, those who wish to break that connection, to defend Strauss (and sometimes, but not always, his students as well) from those charges. Instead, and keeping well with the mission statement of the Cambridge Companion to Philosophy series -- to overcome "intimidation" and "serve as a reference for students and non specialists" -- Smith has assembled a very sober volume. As Smith says in his lucid and succinct introduction, he has brought together the ten essays in the volume (plus his intro and his own brief biographical overview of Strauss's life and work, for a total of 12 chapters) in order "to canvass the wide range of Strauss's interests" (6). Some might question whether the term "wide-ranging" can aptly be applied to the group of contributing authors, most of whom are either self-identified Straussians, students of Strauss, or scholars who have taught or studied at the University of Chicago. Yet I use this passive construction not to smuggle in my own criticism on this front, but rather to displace it. Many recent works on Strauss and contemporary politics have become caught up in a hopeless and seemingly endless process of name calling, and I have no interest in playing that game. More importantly, it should not come as a surprise that when faced with the editorial task of finding experts on Strauss to contribute to an edited volume, Smith would wind up choosing many individuals who fall into one of these three groups. Finally, Smith has, in fact, brought together a wide array of approaches to Strauss – including some criticisms. More importantly, the book proves broad in terms of themes (from the problem of modernity, to religion and reason, to social science method, to political regimes), time periods (from early writings and letters, some still not translated into English, through the well-known and widely-read books, to late essays and spoken remarks), and approaches (some authors treat Strauss as a scholar and actor in his own right, some take him as a teacher, and some address him as a philosopher engaging with timeless questions). . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=19673.

Weber, Barret. "On Leo Strauss's Legacy." TELOS SCOPE May 25, 2009.

Zuckert, Catherine, and Michael Zuckert. The Truth about Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy and American Democracy. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006.

Smith, Stephen. Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006.

Strauss's challenge both to philosophical relativism and to historicism remains as incisive today as when it was first enunciated. But the repercussions of Strauss's work move well beyond an immanent critique of Weber and the methodology of the social sciences. His legacy remains and pushes us to ask difficult questions about how we understand the emergence of European tyranny in the twentieth century, and about how we live in relation to such events, which Hannah Arendt argued destroyed all prior categories of thought.[5] Nassar Behnegar, author of Leo Strauss, Max Weber, and the Scientific Study of Politics (2003), argues that "Strauss turned away from the 'value free' social science of his time, which could not understand Hitler's and Stalin's regimes as tyrannies, and turned towards classical political philosophy out of a desire for a genuine social science."[6] Due to many factors—some of his own making, especially in regard to his striking anti-liberal leanings, and also others basically beyond his control—Strauss's role in the remaking of political and social science is not widely appreciated today. His writings represent a serious controversy primarily for political reasons with those philosophers and social critics who have encountered him in one forum or another. Just the mention of Strauss today can stir animosity and resistance to actually reading his texts, which are allegedly tainted with justifications of inequality and elitism. At least as far as his philosophical insights are tied to his controversial "political" legacy as a so-called "neo-conservative," perhaps the neo-conservative theorist of our time, his deep and positive impact on philosophy and the social sciences risks being lost in the context of various claims that attempts to directly associate him with the protracted war in Iraq, the "war on terror" more generally, or the Bush Administration and its history of "noble lies" in the name of democratic freedoms. . . .

Read the rest here: http://www.telospress.com/main/index.php?main_page=news_article&article_id=307.

"Law and Politics, Nature and Revelation: Leo Strauss in the European-American Conversation," Tilburg University, May 29-30, 2008.

Although more than three decades have passed since his decease, the political philosopher Leo Strauss continues to remain in ‘the odor of controversy’. The conference aims to address this issue from a fresh and largely unexplored angle. With the publication of Strauss’s collected works, a great number of early writings, some of which were unknown, have become available (Gesammelte Schriften, edited by H. and W. Meier, Vol. 1-3, 1996-2001). These writings reveal Strauss making a number of important scholarly discoveries with profound philosophical impact, developing a distinct voice as a thinker, and trying to make himself heard in the intellectual clamour of the Weimar years. Moreover, they throw additional and intriguing light on several of the core themes of his thought: reason and revelation, ancients and moderns, as well as philosophy and politics. When the war forced him to flee Europe in 1938, the midst of his life and academic trajectory, Strauss found hospitable refuge in the United States, where he was challenged to find his bearings anew. There, he embarked on an impressive career that was as influential as it was controversial: since his death in 1973, the debate surrounding his work never completely subsided, and a recent flare-up occurred when he was accused of having been a godfather to the neo-conservative movement. In the light of this turbulent reception, the publication of the early writings offer an excellent opportunity to Strauss scholars and interpreters to discuss the question of how the European half of Strauss’s life and thought relates to the American half. The conference seeks to address this topic through a variety of subsidiary questions, such as the following:

• How should we assess the value of Strauss’s European work for the understanding of his American work (and vice versa)?
• To what extent did Strauss’s passage to the United States compel him to reorient his work as a scholar and as a political philosopher?
• To what extent does the early work shed additional light on Strauss as a Jewish thinker?
• Does the early work allow us to reconstruct what might have been Strauss’s contribution to what is called the ‘Weimar conversation’ concerning law, politics and religion?
• To what extent does the early work invite us to reconsider existing interpretations of Strauss’s position vis-à-vis contemporaries such as Max Weber, Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt and Alexandre Kojève?
• How does the early work allow us to address the critical reception of Strauss as the putative godfather of American neo-conservatism?

Participation in the conference is free of charge, but we kindly ask that you register online.

Further details are here: http://www.tilburguniversity.nl/faculties/humanities/dphil/strauss/.

Mansfield, Harvey C. "Timeless Mind." CLAREMONT REVIEW OF BOOKS (Winter 2007).

• Sheppard, Eugene R. Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile: the Making of a Political Philosopher. Waltham, MA: Brandeis UP, 2006.
• Tanguay, Daniel. Leo Strauss: an Intellectual Biography. Trans. Christopher Nadon. New Haven: Yale UP, 2007.

These two books on Leo Strauss—two more!—cover the development of Strauss's thought. They differ in two obvious ways. Daniel Tanguay is sympathetic to Strauss and might reasonably be called a Straussian, a particularly supple and elegant one. He works from within Strauss's thought, neither taking him for granted nor rejecting his premises. Eugene Sheppard is an intellectual historian who as such rejects the possibility of the "timeless mind" that Strauss accepts, and who therefore writes from a perspective outside Strauss. But he is not unfriendly to him, and thanks him for having "widened my own horizons." The other difference is over Strauss's conservatism. Tanguay thinks it to be merely "circumstantial," and to hold otherwise he regards as a "fundamental error." Sheppard, however, believes that conservatism is the key to Strauss and says so repeatedly. Strauss came to America "an obscure conservative immigrant," and there acquired his "American persona" as a conservative. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1505/article_detail.asp.

Atlas, James. "The Nation: Leo-Cons; a Classicist's Legacy: New Empire Builders." NEW YORK TIMES May 4, 2003.

Strauss Redux: To intellectual-conspiracy theorists, the Bush administration's foreign policy is entirely a Straussian creation. Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, has been identified as a disciple of Strauss; William Kristol, founding editor of The Weekly Standard, a must-read in the White House, considers himself a Straussian; Gary Schmitt, executive director of the Project for the New American Century, an influential foreign policy group started by Mr. Kristol, is firming in the Strauss camp. One is reminded of Asa Leventhal, the hero of Saul Bellow's novel 'The Victim,' who asks his oppressor, a mysterious figure named Kirby Allbee, ''Wait a minute, what's your idea of who runs things?'' For those who believe in the power of ideas, it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to answer: the intellectual heirs of Leo Strauss. So how did it come to pass that a European-born émigré identified by the Harvard professor of government Harvey Mansfield (also a Straussian) as ''an obscure professor of political philosophy at the University of Chicago who died in 1973'' now occupies a position of such disproportionate influence? . . . The rest is here: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C07E7D8153CF937A35756C0A9659C8B63.

Horton, Scott. "Will the Real Leo Strauss Please Stand Up?" HARPER'S MAGAZINE January 21, 2008.

Leo Strauss died back in 1973. But in the last few years it’s been hard to come up with a figure who has been more loved and reviled among those who study and write about political philosophy. And even among those who love him, there seems to be a very catty rage over just who are the proper “Straussians.” A lot of this of course has to do with the Neoconservative movement, which properly claims roots in the writing and thinking of Leo Strauss. The obvious starting point would be to note that while it may be true that the Neocons are Straussians, the suggestion that Strauss is a Neocon is more than doubtful. After all, he died in 1973, and this would seem to attribute to him rather firmly developed notions about a number of things as to which he had no documented position whatsoever. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/01/hbc-90002212.

Englander, Julie. "Defending Strauss." CHICAGO READER August 24, 2007

Leo Strauss has been blamed for the rise of the neocons and even the invasion of Iraq. Now one of his disciples hopes to clear his name. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.chicagoreader.com/features/stories/leostrauss/