Leo Strauss on Nazism: A Theologico-Political Interpretation
Leo Strauss was one of the most important political philosophers of the twentieth century, in large part because he undertook a systematic reexamination of the meaning of…
Leo Strauss as Poet (A True Story)
Why would the story have been left untold? Because it was absurd? Or…because it did not fit the deep-seated expectations, the lingering prejudices of our times? The…
Philosophy and the Beyond
"The philosophies of this world are blind to true divinity—the living God”. This introductory proposition summarizes a traditional indictment of Christianity as represented most notably by Saint…
What Can Political Science Learn from Literature?
Since the behavioral revolution in the 1960s, political science has increasingly defined itself as the empirical, quantifiable study of politics.[2] Modeled after the natural sciences, behavioralism is…
Nomos, Nature, and Modernity in Brague’s The Law of God
By looking at the historical paths of Greece, Israel, Christianity, and Islam, Brague’s The Law of God compares each civilization’s conceptions of law and divinity. For the…
Loss of Meaning, Loss of Aims: Necessity, Leadership, and Lurking Totalitarianism in Western Culture
The criticism of European modernity and its intellectual developments have long been haunting the Western intellect. Perhaps the first most vigilant observer of encroaching modernity was Pascal,…
Leo Strauss and the Crisis of Modernity (II): the Necessity of Virtue
One of Leo Strauss’ most famous contributions to the study of modern political theory is his known idea of the “three waves of modernity”, in which Strauss…
Leo Strauss and the Crisis of Modernity (I): Liberal Relativism
Few words seem to be as familiar to us in the Western world as the nebulous term “crisis.” We hear it incessantly and for many years. Of…
The Crisis of Our Time: Revisiting Natural Right and History by Leo Strauss and the Critique of Historicism
An expanded version of six lectures Leo Strauss delivered at The University of Chicago in October, 1949, under the auspices of the Charles R. Walgreen Foundation, the…
The Origins of Political Science: Leo Strauss’s Analysis of the Thought of Thomas Hobbes in Natural Right and History
Until Thomas Hobbes boldly claimed that his Leviathan was the first true work of political science, most political philosophers had long believed that it was Socrates who…
The Rudderless Mind
The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction. Mark Lilla. NY: New York Review Books, 2016. Mark Lilla's goal in this book is to warn the reader about…
Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss on the Natural Law: Differing Approaches
Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss were both driven to reconsider the status of the knowability of the natural law by their opposition to the regnant dogmas of…
William H.F. Altman, The Bogotá Lectures; §3. “Plato and ‘Plato’”
There is no doubt that Nietzsche’s relationship to Plato is a complicated one. In my book on Nietzsche, I tried to show that this complexity derives from…
Leo Strauss and His Catholic Readers
Leo Strauss and His Catholic Readers. Geoffrey M. Vaughan, ed. Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press: 2018 A Platonic philosopher and Socratic dialectician, Leo…
Leo Strauss and His Catholic Reader
Leo Strauss and His Catholic Readers. Geoffrey M. Vaughan, ed. Catholic University of America Press, 2018. This is a most welcome, often profound inquiry into the…