Leo Strauss on Political Philosophy: Responding to the Challenge of Positivism and Historicism

by Leo Strauss, Catherine H. Zuckert (Editor)

Leo Strauss is known primarily for reviving classical political philosophy through careful analyses of works by ancient thinkers. As with his published writings, Strauss’s seminars devoted to specific philosophers were notoriously dense, accessible only to graduate students and scholars with a good command of the subject. In 1965, however, Strauss offered an introductory course on political philosophy at the University of Chicago. Using a conversational style, he sought to make political philosophy, as well as his own ideas and methods, understandable to those with little background on the subject.
           
Leo Strauss on Political Philosophy brings together the lectures that comprise Strauss’s “Introduction to Political Philosophy.” Strauss begins by emphasizing the importance of political philosophy in determining the common good of society and critically examining the two most powerful contemporary challenges to the possibility of using political theory to learn about and develop the best political positivism and historicism. In seeking the common good, classical political philosophers like Plato and Aristotle did not distinguish between political philosophy and political science. Today, however, political philosophy must contend with the contemporary belief that it is impossible to know what the good society really is. Strauss emphasizes the need to study the history of political philosophy to see whether the changes in the understanding of nature and conceptions of justice that gradually led people to believe that it is not possible to determine what the best political society is are either necessary or valid. In doing so, he ranges across the entire history of political philosophy, providing a valuable, thematically coherent foundation, including explications of many canonical thinkers, such as Auguste Comte and Immanuel Kant, about whom Strauss did not write extensively in his published writings.
 

Genres: Philosophy, Politics

272 pages, Hardcover

Published July 23, 2018

About the author

Leo Strauss was a 20th century German-American scholar of political philosophy. Born in Germany to Jewish parents, Strauss later emigrated from Germany to the United States. He spent much of his career as a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, where he taught several generations of students and published fifteen books.
Trained in the neo-Kantian tradition with Ernst Cassirer and immersed in the work of the phenomenologists Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, Strauss authored books on Baruch Spinoza and Thomas Hobbes, and articles on Maimonides and Al-Farabi. In the late 1930s, his research focused on the texts of Plato and Aristotle, retracing their interpretation through medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophy, and encouraging the application of those ideas to contemporary political theory.

Reviews

[Chris Maska · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a Professor!

The transcription of lectures seems a poor excuse for a book. Even a great lecture, and how many of these did we hear in college, may not make the transition from spoken word to page. But while I would have preferred a book from Strauss, this transcription is well worth reading.

The ultimate question addressed is whether political philosophy has any use other than the grist for the history of political philosophy? Put another way, have positivism and historicism made political philosophy obsolete?

The lectures are an impressive defense of political philosophy.

[nailik Winter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Useful companion for reading the books of Strauss. I recommend listening to the audio while reading as strauss is a marvelous teacher.