Leo Strauss

Leo Strauss was the German-American political philosopher whose recovery of classical political philosophy — and his diagnosis of modern liberalism's hidden crisis — made him the most controversial and influential thinker in twentieth-century American political science. Fleeing Nazi Germany as a Jew in 1932, he settled at the University of Chicago, where he trained a generation of scholars in the close reading of political texts for their esoteric as well as their exoteric meaning.

Strauss argued that the Enlightenment project of grounding politics in reason and universal rights had produced a nihilism that left liberal democracy unable to defend its own values. His Natural Right and History traced the crisis of modern political thought from Machiavelli through Hobbes to Nietzsche and Heidegger. His students — who came to include influential figures in American foreign policy — drew on his critique of relativism and his admiration for classical virtues, making Straussianism a major force in neoconservative thought.