Tag Archives: Leo Strauss

HomePosts Tagged "Leo Strauss"

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 Strauss (1899-1973) would be intrigued by the “and” in the title of this collection of essays devoted to him and his Catholic readers. It indicates a pairing, a yoking, but of what sort? In Aristotelian…

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 relation between Catholic scholars of political philosophy and Leo Strauss who is among the most influential political philosophers in the twentieth century.  Strauss is well-known for arguing that it is the tension between reason and…

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 system of set doctrines, but as a ‘way of life’ following the model of Socrates, featuring a Socratic ignorance and a searching (zetetic) or erotic skepticism. In this view, the philosopher lives happily with merely…

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 and culture of the “non-ideological” 1950’s during which time Strauss produced some of his major work.[1]
Robert L. Howse is confident in asserting that when all is said and done Strauss did not see…

“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 Strauss
 
“Strauss taught his disciples a belief in absolutes, contempt for relativism, and joy in abstract propositions.”
- Arthur M. Schlesinger
 
Lionel Trilling’s case that many great effects may be generated by an obscure but “chippy”…

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 problem with the field: Modern academic obsessions over positivism and historicism had rendered proper political philosophy obsolete because it eliminated the metaphysical, inquisitive essence that was at its core. The rest of his…

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 strict study of the important concepts and ideas found in the works of Voegelin. In my opinion, these types of projects have failed to bring Voegelin a wider audience and I should therefore take…

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 philosophers of the past in order to learn lessons that might become living truths for us today. But Strauss and Voegelin did not write political treatises defending a specific political ideology, such as…

Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss in the Chinese-Speaking World: Reorienting the Political, Kai Marchal and Carl K.Y. Shaw, eds. Lanham, Lexington Books, 2017.
 
Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss are extremely popular in China, especially in Mainland China—this is no longer a secret in the Western academia. As early as 2003, Stanley Rosen had already told the Boston Globe that “A very,…

Diversity on the Right
Paul Gottfried has noticed a “gaping hole” in my recent piece on Leo Strauss. This “gaping hole” consists of an insufficiently detailed account of the eddies and currents of right-of-center thought with which Gottfried is intimate. In his own work Gottfried takes great care to survey the critical observations of other scholars who challenge the signature interpretations…