Leo Strauss
Modern European · North America · 1899 to 1973
German-born thinker who urged close reading of the old philosophers, and held that modern politics forgot what they knew.
What it is
Leo Strauss (1899 to 1973) was a German-born political philosopher and historian of philosophy. He was born on 20 September 1899 in the small town of Kirchhain, Germany, to a Jewish family, and went to the United States in 1937. He taught at the New School for Social Research and, from 1949, at the University of Chicago.
He wrote mostly as a reader of other thinkers, among them Plato, Xenophon, Maimonides and Al-Farabi, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza and Nietzsche. His studies range across ancient, medieval and modern political philosophy. He doubted that twentieth-century philosophy could answer the challenge of moral and political relativism.
The main ideas
- Read closely. His method put weight on close reading of the great texts of political thought, which he held still have something to teach.
- Writing between the lines. He argued that some philosophers wrote esoterically, presenting different teachings to general readers and to specialist readers.
- Natural right. He gave an account of classical natural right, the old question of whether there is a standard of right by nature.
- Ancients and moderns. He wrote about the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns, and sought to reopen it.
- Reason and revelation. The tension between reason and revelation is central to his writings.
What it looks like in practice
Imagine a student given a short old text and told to read it three times. First for what it says, then for what the author avoids saying, then for why a careful author might have chosen to be careful. This is an illustration of the method, not a passage from his writing.
Books and moments
- On Tyranny (1948) is one of his major works.
- Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952) is one of his major works.
- Natural Right and History (1953) is one of his major works, on natural right.
- Thoughts on Machiavelli is another of his books, a study of the thinker Niccolo Machiavelli.
Questions and criticism
- Was there hidden writing? It is an open question how far philosophers really wrote different teachings for different readers.
- Politics. He has been called an intellectual forerunner of American neoconservatism. Whether that fits what he wrote, or what his students later did, is argued over.
- The ancient turn. It is open whether the modern world can recover the old questions, or whether he read earlier thinkers too much in his own light.
Close neighbours
The pages on Plato, Maimonides, Hobbes and Spinoza cover the thinkers he wrote about.
Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.
Who they connect to
Influenced by
- Moses Maimonides · He studied Maimonides closely and took from him the idea that careful writers hide meaning between the lines.
Other Modern European thinkers
- Arthur Schopenhauer · 1788 to 1860
- Alexis de Tocqueville · 1805 to 1859
- Thomas Henry Huxley · 1825 to 1895
- Wilhelm Dilthey · 1833 to 1911
- Friedrich Nietzsche · 1844 to 1900
- Sigmund Freud · 1856 to 1939
- Georg Simmel · 1858 to 1918
- Henri Bergson · 1859 to 1941
- Max Weber · 1864 to 1920
- Ernst Cassirer · 1874 to 1945
Sources we used
- Leo Strauss · Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, read on 29 October 2026
- Leo Strauss · Wikipedia, read on 29 October 2026