Product Description

Leo Strauss was a central figure in the 20th century renaissance of political philosophy. The essays of The Cambridge Companion to Leo Strauss provide a comprehensive and non-partisan survey of the major themes and problems that constituted Strauss's work. These include his revival of the great "quarrel between the ancients and the moderns," his examination of tension between Jerusalem and Athens, and most controversially his recovery of the tradition of esoteric writing. The volume also examines Strauss's complex relation to a range of contemporary political movements and thinkers, including Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Gershom Scholem, as well as the creation of a distinctive school of "Straussian" political philosophy.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #45790 in Books
• Published on: 2009-05-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 324 pages

About the Author
Steven B. Smith, the Alfred Cowles Professor of Political Science at Yale University, is the author of Reading Leo Strauss, Spinoza's Book of Life, and Spinoza, Liberalism, and Jewish Identity. His publications have appeared most recently in Hebraic Political Studies, Review of Politics, and Political Theory, and he has lectured throughout the United States, Europe, and Israel. Professor Smith has held the position of Master of Branford College at Yale since 1996.

Customer Reviews

Strauss studies has come of age.
Apparently, I came to my study of Leo Strauss (LS) at a good time. LS died in 1973. His work put him well out of the mainstream at the time and was ignored by pretty much all those who had not had the good fortune to have studied with him. But his students proceeded to continue to produce a remarkable (not always the same thing as good) body of work. By the early nineties those students and their students started to produce some of the first book length studies of LS. See, for example, the collections edited by Deutsch, Murley and Novak.
Then came the long dark night of the American soul, i.e., the administration of Bush v.2.0. The rise of the neocons was a boon to such Straussian critics as Shadia Drury. But that period also saw the publication of excellent studies by Tanguay, the Zuckerts, Pangle, Meier and Stephen Smith.
Just for the record, I have never seen much of Strauss in the policies of the Bush administration.
And now that we as a nation have come (a little) to our senses and gotten rid of the UltraMaroon and his minions, it seems like a good time to dispassionately examine the work of a man who was supposed to have inspired many of those minions.
Maybe, just maybe people will now read Strauss to really hear what he has to say. It is my experience that LS is worth more than the reading of one or two of his books. He speaks to so many central issues, e.g., the difference between authority and power, the difference between having a soul and having a self, between reason and law, reason and revelation. He is certainly the most decent and thoughtful proponent of inequality of whom I know. LS held to a variation of Jefferson's idea of a natural aristocracy. In the case of LS, I suppose you could call him a proponent of philosophical inequality.
For all these reasons and many more, Smith's addition to the Cambridge Companion series is very welcome. To my mind, it represents the maturation of the latest period of Strauss studies.
Smith had gathered many people who have contributed to the period, i.e., the Zuckerts, Lampert, Rosen, Behnegar and Batnitzky. The other contributors are equally good. William Galston's essay (for an old leftist like myself) on Strauss' 'embrace' of liberal democracy is worth a review in itself. I will only point out his trenchant discussion of the way that LS perceived the differences between Greek and modern democracy (see pp.198-9). I challenge any liberal or leftist to read this essay (and the others in this book) and not come to see Strauss as providing a powerful challenge to some of our fundamental beliefs.
Some of the other essays are powerful readings of some of Strauss' essays. Behnegar deeply mines Strauss' "Afterward" which is available in Liberalism Ancient and Modern. Shell digs deep into Strauss' essay on German Nihilism. Kraemer culls together many of LS' writings on the medieval Islamic philosophers. And by the way, this is something Strauss critics should consider. He was responsible for a fairly major rebirth of interest in Alfarabi, Avicenna, Maimonides and many other Jewish and Arabic philosophers. Because of his work and those of his students we are a much broader vision of Western philosophy than we did when I studied it in the 70s. For that alone, we are all in his and their debt.
Smith has done a wonderful job. We get interpretations of LS as Neitzschean, as atheist, as agnostic rationalist, as a defender of the Jewish faith, as a follower of Socrates. The odd thing about LS is that he was all of those things. He managed to keep all those differences in a remarkable creative tension because he was that rare thing- a first rate thinker who was also a brilliant and deeply sympathetic exegete.
Whether you are new to the reading of Strauss and looking for a roadmap or someone looking to deepen their reading of LS, this book is should be on your list. It is altogether satisfying. I recently created a Listmania of secondary sources on LS that might be useful to further reading. Read deeply, my friends. We all got some expanding to do.