Leo Strauss Biography Quotes 7 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Leo Strauss (1899-1973) was born in Kirchhain, in the German state of Hesse, into a Jewish family whose life was shaped by the rhythms of small-town commerce and synagogue observance. He came of age in the aftermath of the German Empire and the upheavals of World War I, a setting that sharpened his lifelong concern with the fate of liberal democracy and the deeper philosophical questions that undergird it. As a young man he gravitated to philosophy and classical studies, moving among Germanys great universities at a time when they were centers of intellectual ferment.

Strauss studied at Marburg, Freiburg, and Hamburg, encountering the neo-Kantian school associated with Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp, and attending lectures that introduced him to the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and the probing radicalism of Martin Heidegger. He completed his doctoral work at the University of Hamburg in 1921 under Ernst Cassirer, writing on Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. The rigor of these mentors, together with the Weimar-era debates over reason, revelation, and politics, set the frame for his mature reflections.

Weimar Years and Intellectual Formation
In the 1920s Strauss worked in Berlin at the Academy for the Science of Judaism, a hub for scholarship on the Jewish philosophical tradition led by figures such as Julius Guttmann. There he delved into medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophy, especially Moses Maimonides and Alfarabi, as well as Baruch Spinoza. His early book, Spinozas Critique of Religion (first published in German), probed the tension between biblical faith and philosophical rationalism and challenged simple narratives of Enlightenment progress.

The Weimar crisis fostered his exchanges with a wide circle that included Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin, and his complex engagement with the legal and political theorist Carl Schmitt. Strauss recognized the power of Schmitts diagnosis of liberal weakness but rejected his authoritarian remedy; the encounter spurred Strauss to seek an alternative in classical political philosophy. As the Nazis rose to power, Strauss left Germany and used a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to continue research in Paris and then in England.

Emigration, Early Works, and New School
By the mid-1930s Strauss was in Britain, where he completed The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis, arguing that modern political philosophy marked a decisive break with the classical tradition. In 1938 he emigrated to the United States and joined the New School for Social Research in New York, an institution that welcomed displaced European scholars. There he refined his method of close textual interpretation, insisting that great books reward line-by-line attention and that philosophers often write with a double register: exoteric teaching for the many and esoteric guidance for the few.

During these years he deepened his studies of Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Maimonides, laying the groundwork for his later major statements. He also established friendships and intellectual partnerships that would be central for decades, including with Joseph Cropsey and Jacob Klein.

University of Chicago Years
In 1949 Strauss moved to the University of Chicago, where he taught in the Department of Political Science and was associated with the Committee on Social Thought. Chicago offered him a setting in which teaching and writing were integrated. His classroom, remembered by many as a place of searching, unsentimental inquiry, brought together students who would become notable scholars and public intellectuals: Allan Bloom, Seth Benardete, Harvey Mansfield, Harry V. Jaffa, Stanley Rosen, Thomas Pangle, and others. The discussions he led often began with a precise reading of a page of text and opened onto the largest questions about justice, nobility, and the human good.

At Chicago he published Persecution and the Art of Writing, which argued that fear of persecution taught some philosophers to hide heterodox insights beneath the surface; Natural Right and History, his most widely read book, which mounted a critique of historicism and positivism and reopened the question of natural right; Thoughts on Machiavelli, a severe, unflinching study of modern political realism; What Is Political Philosophy?, a collection clarifying his approach; and The City and Man, which returned to classical texts to illuminate enduring civic questions.

Method and Themes
Strauss described his endeavor as a return to classical political philosophy without nostalgia, a recovery rather than a reconstruction. He held that Socratic inquiry had been eclipsed by modern projects that lowered the aims of philosophy to power, comfort, or historical self-consciousness. Against that lowering, he argued for the permanent possibility of natural right discernible through reason, even if its content could never be codified once and for all.

He approached texts with the hypothesis that great thinkers sometimes wrote between the lines. Esotericism, in his account, was not conspiracy but pedagogy and prudence: a response to political danger and an acknowledgment of the diverse capacities of readers. This method informed his interpretations of Xenophons Hiero (On Tyranny), of Maimonides Guide of the Perplexed, and of Alfarabis political writings. The exchange with Alexandre Kojeve appended to later editions of On Tyranny staged a memorable confrontation between classical and Hegelian views of history, tyranny, and the end of man.

Interlocutors and Intellectual Milieu
Throughout his career Strauss placed himself in dialogue with decisive modern thinkers. He wrestled with Max Weber on fact and value, with Nietzsche on the crisis of modernity, with Heidegger on the status of Being and the limits of rationalism, and with Schmitt on the friend-enemy distinction and the fragility of liberal norms. He distinguished his position from Isaiah Berlins value pluralism while acknowledging its influence on debates about freedom and diversity. These interlocutors, together with allies and students like Joseph Cropsey and Allan Bloom, formed a living context in which his ideas took shape.

Teaching and Influence
Strausss influence spread chiefly through teaching. Students trained by him or by his students went on to form clusters at universities across North America. They advanced close readings of classical texts, produced studies of Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Maimonides, and carried on disputes about natural right, civic education, and constitutionalism. While some readers associated Strausss legacy in the United States with strands of postwar conservatism, he resisted partisan labels and insisted on the primacy of philosophical inquiry over programmatic politics. His seminars emphasized listening to the text before judging it, and his correspondence with pupils often urged patience and restraint in interpretation.

Later Years
After two decades at Chicago, Strauss taught in his later years at institutions that prized liberal education, notably St. Johns College in Annapolis. There he continued seminars on the classics and refined essays that circulated among his students. The final books published in his lifetime, including Liberalism Ancient and Modern, collected essays that juxtaposed classical and modern perspectives on liberty, law, and education. He died in 1973 in Annapolis, leaving behind unpublished lectures and notes that would be edited posthumously by close collaborators.

Legacy
Strauss altered the landscape of political philosophy by rendering the classics newly audible and by challenging settled assumptions about the modern break with antiquity. His recovery of esoteric writing redirected scholarship on medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophy and reshaped the study of Plato and Xenophon. The breadth of his conversation partners, from Cassirer, Husserl, and Heidegger to Schmitt, Scholem, Benjamin, and Kojeve, showed his readiness to engage rivals at their strongest. The community of students and readers who emerged from his classrooms extended his influence into debates about constitutional interpretation, civic virtue, liberal education, and the limits of social science. Whether embraced as a guide to perennial questions or criticized as unduly skeptical of modernity, Strauss remains a central figure for anyone seeking to understand the relationship among philosophy, revelation, and political life.

Our collection contains 7 quotes who is written by Leo, under the main topics: Wisdom - Knowledge - God.