# Leo Strauss The most consequential political philosopher of the American right — not because he prescribed a political program, but because his students and their students built one. Leo Strauss (1899-1973) was a German-Jewish emigre who taught at the University of Chicago from 1949 to 1969, training several generations of scholars who went on to shape [[Neoconservatism]], dominate conservative intellectual institutions, and — in the case of the [[Iraq War]] — drive American foreign policy. Strauss himself wrote about Plato, Maimonides, and Machiavelli. His students wrote the playbook for American empire. ## Background Born in Kirchhain, Germany, to an Orthodox Jewish family, Strauss studied philosophy at the University of Marburg under [[Edmund Husserl]] and [[Martin Heidegger]]. He left Germany in 1932 — before Hitler's rise to power — on a Rockefeller Fellowship, moving first to Paris, then England, then the United States. He held a position at the New School for Social Research in New York from 1938 to 1949 before joining the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought, where he became a legendary and polarizing teacher. Strauss's personal experience of [[Weimar Germany]]'s collapse — a liberal democracy destroyed from within — haunted his intellectual project. He concluded that modern liberalism contained the seeds of its own destruction: moral relativism, historicism, and the abandonment of the idea that some political orders are objectively better than others. ## Core Ideas ### Natural Right Strauss's major work *[[Natural Right and History]]* (1953) argued against the prevailing academic consensus — shared by positivists and historicists — that there are no permanent standards of right and wrong. Strauss contended that classical political philosophy (Plato, Aristotle, the medieval rationalists) had access to genuine truths about human nature and political order that modern philosophy had abandoned. The crisis of modernity, for Strauss, was the crisis of nihilism that resulted from this abandonment. ### Esoteric Reading In *Persecution and the Art of Writing* (1952), Strauss advanced his most controversial methodological claim: that the great philosophers wrote on two levels. The **exoteric** surface was safe for public consumption. The **esoteric** meaning — often heterodox, dangerous, or politically destabilizing — was encoded between the lines for careful readers. This theory of "esoteric writing" has been both Strauss's most influential contribution and the source of his most persistent critics' complaint: that it licenses readers to find whatever they want in a text. The political implication — whether intended by Strauss or not — is that the truth is not for everyone. Some truths must be concealed from the masses for the sake of social order. Critics like Shadia Drury have argued this amounts to a philosophical justification for elite deception — the "noble lie" of Plato's *Republic* operationalized as political strategy. ### The Crisis of Modernity Strauss traced a line from Machiavelli through Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Nietzsche, arguing that each "wave of modernity" moved further from the classical understanding of natural right and closer to nihilism. Heidegger's embrace of Nazism was, for Strauss, the logical endpoint of modern philosophy's abandonment of permanent moral standards — proof that historicism led not to liberation but to tyranny. ## The Straussian Network Strauss's real-world influence flows through his students and their institutional positions. The network splits into two major factions: ### East Coast Straussians Based primarily at universities in the northeastern United States, this faction — associated with scholars like [[Harvey Mansfield]] (Harvard) and Allan Bloom (Chicago/Cornell) — tends to read Strauss as fundamentally skeptical about the possibility of reconciling philosophy and politics. They emphasize the tension between the philosopher's pursuit of truth and the citizen's need for salutary myths. [[Allan Bloom]]'s *[[The Closing of the American Mind]]* (1987) became a surprise bestseller that translated Straussian concerns about relativism into a culture-war polemic against the 1960s university. ### West Coast Straussians The [[Claremont Institute]] lineage, founded by Harry Jaffa — Strauss's first PhD student — reads the American Founding as a genuine achievement of natural right philosophy. Where East Coast Straussians see America as another modern regime with inherent philosophical limitations, West Coast Straussians see the Declaration of Independence as a Straussian document. This faction has become the more politically consequential one: Claremont-affiliated intellectuals provided key intellectual justifications for Trump-era politics, and the Claremont-published *Journal of American Greatness* (later the *Claremont Review of Books*) became a hub for intellectual Trumpism. ## Influence on Neoconservatism The connection between Strauss and [[Neoconservatism]] runs through multiple channels: **[[Paul Wolfowitz]]** studied under [[Allan Bloom]] (himself a Strauss student) at Cornell and later at Chicago. As Deputy Secretary of Defense under [[George W. Bush]], Wolfowitz was a principal architect of the Iraq War — and journalists traced the intellectual lineage from Strauss's seminars to the invasion of Baghdad. **[[Irving Kristol]]** — the self-described "godfather of neoconservatism" — acknowledged Strauss's influence on his own intellectual development, though Kristol was not a formal student. Kristol's son Bill Kristol studied under Harvey Mansfield at Harvard (Mansfield was a Strauss student) and co-founded the [[Project for the New American Century]], the think tank that advocated for regime change in Iraq years before 9/11. **Abram Shulsky**, another Strauss student, directed the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, which produced the contested intelligence used to justify the Iraq War — a fact that critics found grimly consistent with Strauss's theory that political elites must sometimes operate on a level inaccessible to the public. The degree to which Strauss himself would have endorsed the Iraq War — or neoconservative foreign policy generally — is genuinely debated. Strauss wrote almost nothing about American politics directly. His students disagree. The "Strauss caused the Iraq War" narrative is too simple; the "Strauss has nothing to do with neoconservatism" defense is too convenient. ## Legacy in the KB Context Strauss matters for this knowledge base because he is the **intellectual root system** beneath multiple branches of the American right. The [[Claremont Institute]] lineage connects directly to Trumpist constitutional theory. The neoconservative lineage connects to the [[American Enterprise Institute]], the [[Project for the New American Century]], and the foreign policy establishment that shaped the War on Terror. The Straussian emphasis on reading texts for hidden meanings has influenced [[Originalism]] debates around the Constitution. And the philosophical question at the center of Strauss's work — whether liberal democracy can survive without a shared belief in permanent moral truths — remains the animating question of the post-Trump right. ## Major Works - *The [[Political Philosophy]] of Hobbes* (1936) - *On Tyranny* (1948) - *Persecution and the Art of Writing* (1952) - *Natural Right and History* (1953) - *Thoughts on Machiavelli* (1958) - *The City and Man* (1964) ## See Also - [[Neoconservatism]] — The ideology his students built - [[Claremont Institute]] — West Coast Straussian institutional base - [[Allan Bloom]] — Student; *The Closing of the American Mind* - [[Paul Wolfowitz]] — Student of Bloom; Iraq War architect - [[Irving Kristol]] — Neoconservatism's godfather; Strauss-influenced - [[American Enterprise Institute]] — Neoconservative policy hub - [[Project for the New American Century]] — Wolfowitz/Kristol foreign policy vehicle - [[Originalism]] — Constitutional philosophy shaped by Straussian debates - [[William F. Buckley Jr.]] — Parallel conservative intellectual tradition