# Natural Right and History [[Leo Strauss]]'s most influential book (1953, from his 1949 Walgreen Lectures) — the founding text of [[Straussianism]] and the 20th-century right's most sophisticated brief against relativism. ## The argument Strauss opens with the Declaration of Independence and asks whether America still believes in the "self-evident" truths it proclaimed — or whether the modern social sciences, by reducing all values to historical products (historicism) or undemonstrable preferences (positivism/Weber), have dissolved natural right into nihilism. The body of the book recovers the tradition: classic natural right ([[Plato]], [[Aristotle]], [[Cicero]]) grounded in a knowable human nature and its ends; then the modern break — [[Thomas Hobbes]] re-founding right on fear and self-preservation, [[John Locke]] on acquisitive individualism, [[Jean-Jacques Rousseau]] and Edmund Burke each, in different ways, preparing historicism — each "wave" carrying further from nature toward the abyss Strauss associated with [[Martin Heidegger]]'s embrace of Nazism. ## Why it matters for this KB This is the book that taught postwar American conservatism to say "natural right" instead of just "tradition" — and to blame relativism for civilizational crisis. Its Declaration-framed opening let [[the West]] Coast Straussians ([[Harry V. Jaffa]], the [[Claremont Institute]]) read America itself as the natural-right regime; its waves-of-modernity scheme became the right's standard decline genealogy (each liberal hero exposed as a step toward nihilism); its quiet method (esoteric reading between the lines) trained generations to find hidden teachings in canonical texts. Threads 3 and 8 of [[Philosophy in Right-Wing Thought Hub]] both run through this book; the [[Natural Law]] tradition page marks its differences from the Thomist line (Strauss's "natural right" is classical and philosophical, not biblical). ## See also - [[Leo Strauss]] / [[Straussianism]] — author and school - [[Natural Law]] — the adjacent (not identical) tradition - [[Claremont Institute]] — the institutional heir - [[Epistemology]] — the anti-relativism war it armed