Leo Strauss and the Crisis of Modernity (II): the Necessity of Virtue
One of Leo Strauss’ most famous contributions to the study of modern political theory is his known idea of the “three waves of modernity”, in which Strauss…
Leo Strauss and the Crisis of Modernity (I): Liberal Relativism
Few words seem to be as familiar to us in the Western world as the nebulous term “crisis.” We hear it incessantly and for many years. Of…
The Crisis of Our Time: Revisiting Natural Right and History by Leo Strauss and the Critique of Historicism
An expanded version of six lectures Leo Strauss delivered at The University of Chicago in October, 1949, under the auspices of the Charles R. Walgreen Foundation, the…
The Origins of Political Science: Leo Strauss’s Analysis of the Thought of Thomas Hobbes in Natural Right and History
Until Thomas Hobbes boldly claimed that his Leviathan was the first true work of political science, most political philosophers had long believed that it was Socrates who…
The Rudderless Mind
The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction. Mark Lilla. NY: New York Review Books, 2016. Mark Lilla's goal in this book is to warn the reader about…
Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss on the Natural Law: Differing Approaches
Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss were both driven to reconsider the status of the knowability of the natural law by their opposition to the regnant dogmas of…
William H.F. Altman, The Bogotá Lectures; §3. “Plato and ‘Plato’”
There is no doubt that Nietzsche’s relationship to Plato is a complicated one. In my book on Nietzsche, I tried to show that this complexity derives from…
Leo Strauss and His Catholic Readers
Leo Strauss and His Catholic Readers. Geoffrey M. Vaughan, ed. Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press: 2018 A Platonic philosopher and Socratic dialectician, Leo…
Leo Strauss and His Catholic Reader
Leo Strauss and His Catholic Readers. Geoffrey M. Vaughan, ed. Catholic University of America Press, 2018. This is a most welcome, often profound inquiry into the…
On the Catholic Appreciation of Leo Strauss
Leo Strauss and His Catholic Readers. Geoffrey M. Vaughan, ed. Washington D.C.: Catholic University Press, 2018. “Strauss embraced classical philosophy over religious faith, not as a…
Leo Strauss and the 1960s
Almost inevitably the effort to claim Leo Strauss for the left has to deal with the problem of the 1960’s “Revolution” and its transformation of the politics…
Leo Strauss and The National Review
“The crisis of liberalism is a crisis due to the fact that it has abandoned its absolutist basis and is trying to become entirely relativistic.” - Leo…
Leo Strauss vs. Edmund Burke
A known critic of historicism and contextualism, Leo Strauss published his seminal essay, ‘What is Political Philosophy?’ in 1957 in the Journal of Politics and introduced a…
Silence is Not Always Golden: Investigating the Silence Surrounding the Thought of Eric Voegelin
I What I offer in these pages is not an “introduction to the reading of Voegelin” à la Alexandre Kojève with Hegel. Nor am I undertaking a…
The Burkean Tradition of Strauss and Voegelin
Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin were scholars in the field of political philosophy, yet they did not have an explicit political teaching. They studied the great political…
