Leo Strauss

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Leo Strauss (born September 20, 1899 in Kirchhain , Hesse ; † October 18, 1973 in Annapolis , Maryland , United States ) was a German-American philosopher . As a professor of political philosophy , he taught from 1949 to 1969 at the University of Chicago . Strauss is regarded as the founder of an influential school of thought - the Straussians - and as a critic of modern philosophy and modern liberal thought in general.

Life

Leo Strauss - son of the businessman Hugo Strauss and his wife Josephine David - grew up in a conservative Jewish family . The father traded in agricultural machinery . In 1931 Strauss wrote to Gerhard Krüger , a professor of philosophy in Marburg , that the fact was not indifferent "that when I was asked which nation I was, I would answer: Jew and not German."

Strauss attended the Philippinum humanistic grammar school in Marburg . In 1918 he began studying philosophy at the University of Hamburg ; he also devoted himself to mathematics and the natural sciences . In 1921 Leo Strauss received his doctorate from Ernst Cassirer on Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi . He then continued his studies at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg and at the Philipps University of Marburg until 1925 . a. with Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger . In Marburg he was able to make friends with Hans-Georg Gadamer , Hans Jonas , Jacob Klein and Karl Löwith .

As early as 1916, Strauss had joined the “Jüdischer Wanderbund Blau-Weiß”, an association of Jewish high school pupils and students. The Wanderbund was modeled on the Wandervogel youth movement . While still studying in Marburg and beyond, Strauss took part in the debates surrounding Jewish and Zionist-oriented associations.

From 1925 to 1932 he worked at the College for the Science of Judaism in Berlin, where, under the direction of Julius Guttmann , he mainly worked on Spinoza and was co-editor of the Moses Mendelssohn anniversary edition. During this time he met Hannah Arendt , Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem . A request to the theologian and religious socialist Paul Tillich regarding a habilitation was turned down in 1931.

Then, before the beginning of the Nazi dictatorship , he went to Paris on a Rockefeller grant (expert: Carl Schmitt ). There he met Alexandre Kojève and Alexandre Koyré . In 1933 he married Mirjam Petry (née Bernson) there. From 1934 to 1938 he received another Rockefeller grant, this time for Cambridge in England, to do research there on Thomas Hobbes . In 1938 Strauss went to the United States and taught at the New School for Social Research in New York City. In 1944 he became a US citizen. In the same year he adopted his orphaned niece Jenny: Her mother Bettina, Strauss' sister - she had received her doctorate from the philosopher Nicolai Hartmann - died in childbirth. Jenny's father, the Arabist and science historian Paul Kraus , had committed suicide.

In 1949, Strauss was appointed professor of political philosophy at the University of Chicago, where he taught until his retirement in 1968. He did not accept the chair successor to Martin Buber at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem that was offered to him in 1950 , but taught there as a visiting professor in 1954/55. Strauss only traveled to the Federal Republic of Germany once: in 1954 he visited Löwith and Gadamer in Heidelberg, where he gave a lecture on Socrates .

In 1965 he was appointed to a visiting professorship in Hamburg, but could not take it for health reasons. In the same year he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Hamburg and the Great Federal Cross of Merit from the German Consul General in Chicago. In 1968 he was appointed a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

At the invitation of his friend Jacob Klein, he was Scott Buchanan's Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at St. John's College in Annapolis , Maryland from 1969 until his death in 1973 .

philosophy

Overview

  • Criticism of modernity: Strauss blames the Enlightenment and liberalism for the decline of philosophizing and calls for a return to ancient Platonic-Socratic philosophy. His guiding metaphor is: The Enlightenment did not bring “more light”, but led thinking into a “second cave”, a cellar below the Platonic cave , from which it first had to work its way up to the “first cave”.
  • It deals with fundamental-philosophical questions in the context of “great alternatives”: antiquity or modernity, philosophy or theology, “Athens” or “Jerusalem”, whereby the “belief in revelation” or the Bible represents the existential challenge for philosophy, because it is like the political one Legislation is based on the commandment of obedience and also promises salvation or damnation. According to Strauss, reason alone cannot solve the theological-political problem; every attempt is caught in relativism, which he sharply rejected.
    • This is followed by a rejection of historicism , positivism and relativism as mainstreams of “leveled” modern thinking and as the cause of a crisis because they allegedly deny the possibility of philosophy and reject the classic philosophical conviction that the goal of political life is virtue.
    • Strauss speaks out against Max Weber , especially against his demand for a science free of value judgments and his “noble nihilism”; Instead, Strauss advocates the conviction that modernity can be overcome , primarily through the radicalization of Carl Schmitt's concept of the political .
  • Strauss' anthropology is elitist . With reference to natural law (thus deviating from the usual understanding of a quasi-natural law term) he emphasizes the natural inequality of people - "hierarchical order of the natural constitution of man" according to Plato .

Since his early confrontation with Spinoza, he had the conviction that a philosophical life is reserved for only a few, while the crowd needs the hold of religion and must remain prejudiced in order to ensure peace and order.

Strauss advocates a hermeneutics that distinguishes between exoteric presentation and esoteric coding of texts, whereby the latter dimension is only accessible to the congenial reader, the few who are called to philosophy.

Strauss was an ambitious "networker"; the strategically designed founding and establishment of an academic school was part of his philosophy.

Fonts

The collected works of Leo Strauss comprise around 160 publications, 30 of which are books. Allan Bloom , a student of Strauss, classifies them into early, middle and late works. He differentiates:

1. The phase from around 1920 to 1937, in which Strauss sought his philosophical path. In the 1920s, against the background of the radicalizing philosophical-political debates of the Weimar Republic , he initially concentrated on Jewish topics and the “Jewish problem”. The outstanding work of this phase is Spinoza's Critique of Religion as the basis of his Biblical Studies from 1930. Aspects of philosophy, theology, sociology, history and political science are taken into account in this comprehensive study.

In the 1930s, Strauss turned completely to philosophy and published a. a. 1932 the famous essay Notes on Carl Schmitt, The Concept of Political and 1936 the book Hobbes 'Political Science , which becomes a standard work for understanding Thomas Hobbes'. Strauss takes a critical look at the theories of Karl Jaspers , Karl Mannheim , Carl Schmitt and Max Weber and finds his topic: the political-theological problem. The collection of essays Philosophy and Law from 1935, in which he unfolds his criticism of modernity and the philosophy of religion in the context of medieval Islamic and Jewish theorists such as Al-Farabi and Maimonides , reflects his work in this first period.

2. The second phase begins in 1938: Strauss moves from Cambridge to the USA and thus finds himself in a scientific environment in which advanced political science already exists. Now he asks himself (in addition to the topics he brought with him from Europe) new questions, such as those of the American constitution and the tradition of American political thought. The main works of this period are On Tyranny from 1948, Persecution and the Art of Writing from 1952, Natural Right and History from 1953 and the extensive Thoughts on Machiavelli published in 1958 .

Strauss has been recognized in American political science since the mid-1950s. A ranking of political theorists compiled by the American Political Science Association ranks him 9th among the most important political scientists after 1945 at the end of the 1950s.

3. His late work dates from around 1959, in which he predominantly deals with ancient philosophy . In parallel to his work, a Strauss School was formed , which was largely consolidated through the anthology What is Political Philosophy from 1959 and the History of Political Philosophy , which was edited together with Joseph Cropsey in 1963 . Both volumes should together contain a canonization of the topics and traditions considered essential and replace American textbooks.

Strauss now published in rapid succession studies of Plato , Aristotle and Thucydides ( The City and Man , 1964), also an interpretation of the complete works of Aristophanes ( Socrates and Aristophanes , 1966), analyzes the Socratic writings of Xenophon ( Xenophon's Socratic Discourse 1970 and Xenophon's Socrates from 1972) as well as an interpretation of Plato's Nomoi (Eng. The Laws ), which appeared posthumously in 1975 under the title The Argument and Action of Plato's Laws .

The political-theological problem

Delimitation of religion and politics and a plea for the "political philosophy"

With the sharply formulated pair of opposites of “ Athens ” and “ Jerusalem ”, Strauss means the fundamental difference between a self-determined philosophical life without any authority and a life in the sense of belief in revelation. This pointed position contains a rejection of all non-binding ethical orientations: Either the strict Jewish law or comparable religious orientations apply, or a philosophical skepticism is chosen as the way of life. In between, for Strauss, there are only "mediating positions" who are unable to think about the ultimate consequences.

Heinrich Meier describes the so-called "political-theological problem" as the central theme of Leo Strauss' investigations. For Strauss, according to Meier, divine revelation was the greatest challenge for philosophy, because in the event that there is one divine, i.e. absolute truth, the human endeavor to philosophical, i.e. relative truth, becomes secondary or meaningless. This challenge confronts philosophy with the question of whether the truth is not fundamentally missed if it is freely sought by man. Meier assumes that modernism is suppressing this question raised by Strauss.

Philosophy must first and foremost see itself as “political philosophy”, since its answers always have political effects and must always be justified before revelation. Only when she has realized both can she assert herself. On the other hand, the question of “real life” is deeply political and a profound problematic of philosophy. It is a very Socratic position that a philosopher cannot and may not be a theologian or a politician, which Strauss draws on here. “Political philosophy” in the sense of Strauss legitimizes politics, renders it well-founded, tells it what is good and what is bad, thus also gives it ethical certainty.

For Strauss, the question is not whether philosophy should rule over religion or vice versa. He considers it to be one of the fundamental errors of the Enlightenment or of modernity to be able to “master” or even “do” religion by means of an obscure concept of rationality or reason. In reality, according to Strauss, the Enlightenment, figuratively speaking, fell into a kind of “ Napoleonic strategy” in that it wandered around the fortress of Revelation in order to reach its goal.

Positivism, Historicism and the "Concept of the Political"

Leo Strauss was a Jew and, as an avowed Zionist he was in his younger years, he was primarily concerned with the “ Jewish question ”. His concern was how a Jew could live in a liberal environment, whereby this liberalism did not manage to prevent social discrimination, even if the Jews had equal rights. This was a specific problem that Leo Strauss had to deal with and led him to his theses.

Taking into account his experiences with the Weimar Republic , Strauss criticized that liberalism was ultimately “only” about security, prosperity, property and free economic and scientific development of the citizens. With everything that basically counts among the pleasant material goods, liberalism displaces the real human as well as political, i. H. the universal question of the good as well as the real life, the good in general. Liberally , humanity is defined by prosperity hedonism , which privatizes moral and religious issues. For Strauss, politics has primacy over culture and society. Political philosophy, too, therefore advances to become the first philosophy on which all other philosophy and science are first built. Modernism, on the other hand, considers ancient philosophy to be historically outdated. It suppressed the question of the right political and social order in order to be able to settle down with a concept of pluralism that was questionable for Strauss . You no longer actively create peace, but try to organize it somehow.

Human nature is not created for mere freedom; she needs order, rule and law. So there is a kind of primacy of the political, which demands the unquestioned obedience of the citizens to the state and must not be undermined by the justified appeal to individuality and pluralism.

For a time it looked to some observers as if philosophy emerged victorious from the dispute between religion and the Enlightenment, at least in those systems in which atheistic society had become a reality. These societies have meanwhile taken the “philosophies” with them to the grave. Strauss blames this development on the fact that science has replaced philosophy with the help of the ideas of positivism and historicism , which he personified with their respective protagonists Max Weber and Martin Heidegger.

Positivism regards scientific knowledge as knowledge of concrete facts that would be raised to the status of a "fact" in methodically secure procedures. Understood in this way, positivism excludes the consideration of pre-scientific knowledge as well as the ability to declare value judgments of whatever kind to be valid or invalid. The resulting fading out of moral questions within science, which is only about "facts" or "feasibility", forgets about questioning oneself and can thus become amoral.

Historicism, in turn, which would also amount to a “historicization of philosophy”, leads to the supposed recognition that truth is a function of time or that every philosophy belongs to a certain time and place. The historists no longer asked about the ideas themselves, but only about their origins and placed them in their time. Philosophy or thinking degenerated as a groundless reaction to certain external stimuli and no longer lay claim to timelessness or truth. Strauss describes Max Weber's position as “noble nihilism ”.

Positivism and historicism, according to Strauss, have most clearly exposed the fundamental problem of the modern social sciences , which is their inability to give an account of their own foundations with clarity and certainty. According to Strauss, these two movements endanger thought as a whole and are jointly responsible for the problem of modernity of forgetting its roots and cultural origins.

In an "age of neutralization and depoliticization", Leo Strauss devoted himself to Carl Schmitt's 1927 work The Concept of the Political . Strauss recognized that the disappearance of the political would also endanger philosophy itself. He shared Schmitt's criticism of the time and also followed his definition of the political, which has its highest degree of intensification in the distinction between friend and foe. However, Strauss criticized the fact that, in his opinion, Schmitt's criticism of liberalism remained adherent to liberal thought patterns. He therefore called on Schmitt to show a thinking horizon beyond liberalism. In doing so, Strauss aimed to regain that premodern horizon within which Thomas Hobbes had laid the foundations of liberalism: this horizon is the one which includes the recovery of the political philosophy and natural law thinking of antiquity .

Strauss' plea for ancient natural law

From Strauss' perspective, the insight into the necessary universal order, especially the relationship to nature, remains a difficult task that the majority of people are unable to perform, so that this responsibility lies with the elites of a community. They are allowed to tell people how they should live; according to Strauss, they are also allowed to lie to them; one thinks of the “noble lie” that is even allowed to the philosopher class in Plato's Politeia - known to be the draft of a utopia as “the best constitution”. Leo Strauss primarily follows up on this and hopes to be able to resolve what he believes is the ethical and political uncertainty of both liberalism and modernity.

The often accompanying attempt by many religious or modern people to turn away from the political or to want to abolish it leads in the wrong direction, according to Strauss, simply because of the fact that man is a political being. The tension between philosophy and politics must be understood and integrated in a constructive way, which explains the political dimension of philosophy. The question arises as to how the relationship between politics and philosophy in the original subject area of ​​political philosophy, natural law, can be represented appropriately.

The term “nature” (Greek: physis ) is understood in classical natural law to describe the appearance and action of a class of things that are neither made by the gods nor by humans. There are also things that are said to be “by nature” because they were not the first things to come about, but all other things come about through them. The classic concept of nature has two main dimensions of meaning: first, the “way of life” or “the essential character trait of a thing or a group of things”, and second, the “first things”. The first things are always and imperishable, immutable and of inner necessity. They are not based on conventions and, as the ultimate cause of other things, have a higher dignity than these. The knowledge of the different natures includes the knowledge of their limitation - "nature" is thus primarily an expression of the distinction. What is meant is not nature as a whole, but the individual things or classes of things that are different as parts of the whole.

This gives rise to the function of the concept of nature to set standards. First things take precedence over others, and consequently a way of life that focuses on first things takes precedence over other ways of life. Nature becomes the yardstick for the right way of life and at the same time a prerequisite for value judgments. It can also be seen that the doctrine of natural law, the question of which is directed towards the first things, overlaps with the question of the “best life”, “the best state” and other political questions. This is how Strauss arrived at his destination.

reception

Strauss and the Straussians

That form of political philosophy conveyed by Strauss has not remained without effects and resonance.

As a platonist and academic, he tried to set up his own school that would carry on his ideas of political philosophy; It was important to him to preserve the spirit of political philosophy and to create a suitable educated elite for it.

Many Straussians have worked in the sense of the transmission of important texts and the maintenance of the text : Allan Bloom provided u. a. a standard translation of Plato's Politeia into English and brought out Rousseau's works, Christopher W. Bruell devoted himself to Xenophon, Herbert J. Storing collected and edited the Anti-Federalists, and Howard B. White discussed Francis Bacon and Descartes for a few examples call. Bloom emerged as a cultural critic in the United States with the greatest publicity in terms of Strauss' and published his bestseller The Closing of the American Mind in 1987 . In addition to Bloom, the Strauss students Seth Benardete and Joseph Cropsey are among the most important exegetes of Plato in the United States.

Leo Strauss and practical politics

Strauss criticizes liberalism and relativism from an elitist point of view. He raises questions, the possible answers of which are far from a simple left-right scheme. Strauss was concerned with the ethical and moral foundations of politics and their implementation within the framework of an academic school as well as in political planning committees of a liberal democracy .

Strauss' school of thought had a significant influence on the so-called neoconservatives and the right wing Republicans; As early as 1984 it was stated about the Straussians - in comparison with an ethnologist like Margaret Mead - that significantly more experts on the planning staff in the Foreign Ministry had familiarized themselves with Strauss in detail than had familiarized themselves with different cultures.

“This is obviously a bleak and anti-utopian philosophy that goes against practically everything Americans want to believe. It contradicts the conventional wisdom of modern democratic society. It also contradicts the neoconservatives' own declared policy ambitions to make the Muslim world democratic and establish a new US-led international order, which are blatantly utopian. [...] Strauss's thought is a matter of public interest because his followers are in charge of US foreign policy. But he is more interesting than they are. "

“It's a dark and anti-utopian way of thinking that contradicts everything Americans might believe. It contradicts the everyday wisdom of modern democratic society. It also contradicts the self-proclaimed political plans of the neocons to democratize the Islamic world and establish a new US-led world order that is outrageously utopian. [...] Strauss' way of thinking is the subject of public interest because his supporters are responsible for US foreign policy. But it is much more interesting than this. "

- William Pfaff : The Long Reach of Leo Strauss , May 12, 2003, International Herald Tribune

Very few statements on domestic or foreign policy are known from Strauss himself that are hidden in the philosophical context of the interpretive texts. He was a political philosopher, not a political theorist or even a politician.

Not only Seymour Hersh , Nestor of investigative journalism in the United States, named a “clique” or “gang” of Straussians in the Bush administration as planners and masterminds of the war against Iraq. William Kristol and Robert Kagan indirectly referred to the teachings of Strauss when, after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, they called for a policy that is morally justified and, in particular, ready for political deception such as waging war, and for unconditionally defending the American lifestyle violent enforcement of regime changes. The neoconservatives were temporarily able to assert themselves internally against the bureaucracy of Powell's Foreign Ministry, business lobbyists and the rules of the Pentagon , just as they were - at times - externally able to push aside the framework of the UN and other multilateral organizations such as NATO in favor of their project. Daniel Cohn-Bendit draws the Straussians around Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle , Allan Bloom and Irving Kristol of a neo-conservative Bolshevism whose revolutionary attitude and elitist claim reminded him of his “wild youth”. In the opinion of Norbert Bolz , Leo Strauss introduced pure philosophy into political philosophy using the example of Plato's allegory of the cave .

Fonts

  • 1930: Spinoza's criticism of religion as the basis of his biblical studies: Investigations into Spinoza's theological-political treatise. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1930.
  • 1932: Notes on Carl Schmitt. The concept of the political. In: Heinrich Meier: Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss and “The Concept of the Political”. Stuttgart 1998, pp. 97-125
  • 1935: Philosophy and Law: Contributions to Understanding Maimuni and His Predecessors. Schocken, Berlin.
  • 1956: Natural Law and History. Koehler, Stuttgart.
  • 1963: About tyranny. An interpretation of Xenophon's "Hieron" with an essay on tyranny and wisdom by Alexandre Kojève. Luchterhand, Neuwied am Rhein / Berlin.
  • 1965: Hobbes' Political Science. Luchterhand, Neuwied am Rhein / Berlin.

Collected Writings. 6 vol. Ed. V. Heinrich Meier. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 1996-2006. Published so far:

  • 1996: Vol. 1: Spinoza's criticism of religion and related writings. ISBN 978-3-476-02264-6 .
  • 1997: Vol. 2: Philosophy and Law - Early Writings.
  • 2001: Vol. 3: Hobbes' Political Science and Related Writings - Letters . ISBN 978-3-476-02265-3 .

(in the future: Vol. 4: Political Philosophy. Studies on the theological-political problem. Vol. 5: About Tyrannis. Vol. 6: Thoughts about Machiavelli. )

  • Art of writing. Leo Strauss, Alexandre Kojève, Friedrich Kittler. Berlin: Merve 2009. ISBN 978-3-88396-250-4 .

In English :

  • 1936: The political philosophy of Hobbes: its basis and its genesis. Oxford University Press, London 1936
  • 1952: Persecution and the Art of Writing. Reprint Chicago 1988
  • 1953: Natural Right and History. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London 1953
  • 1958: Thoughts on Machiavelli. Glencoe
  • 1959: What is Political Philosophy? The University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London 1959
  • 1964: The City and Man. Chicago
  • 1968: Liberalism Ancient and Modern. Reprint Chicago 1995
  • 1968: What is Political Philosophy? And other studies. New York / London
  • 1983: Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy. Chicago
  • 1989: An Introduction to Political Philosophy. Ten essays by Leo Strauss, edited with an introduction by Hilail Gildin. Detroit
  • 1989: The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism. An Introduction to the Thought of Leo Strauss. Essays and Lectures by Leo Strauss. Selected and introduced by Thomas L. Pangle, Chicago / London
  • 2004: The Early Writings (1921-1932). Translated and edited by Michael Zank, SUNY Series in the Jewish Thought of Leo Strauss, ed. Kenneth H. Green, Albany: SUNY Press.
  • 2014: Lecture Notes to 'Persecution and the Art of Writing' (1939) , edited by Hannes Kerber, in Reorientation: Leo Strauss in the 1930s . Edited by Martin Yaffe and Richard Rudermann, New York: Palgrave.
  • 2014: Exoteric Teaching , critical edition by Hannes Kerber, in Reorientation: Leo Strauss in the 1930s . Edited by Martin Yaffe and Richard Rudermann, New York: Palgrave.

literature

  • Allan Bloom: Leo Strauss: September 20, 1899 - October 18, 1973. In: ders .: Giants and Dwarfs. Essays 1960–1990 New York, 1990.
  • Harald Bluhm: The order of order. The political philosophizing of Leo Strauss Berlin, 2002.
  • Micha Brumlik : "... a spark of Roman thought ...": Leo Strauss' criticism of Hermann Cohen , Universitätsverlag Winter, Heidelberg 2008, ISBN 978-3-8253-5123-6 .
  • Shadia B. Drury: The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss , New York 1988
  • Peter Gostmann: Albert Salomon, Leo Strauss and political thinking . In: Gostmann, Peter; Härpfer, Claudius (ed.): Abandoned levels of reflection. Albert Salomon and the Enlightenment of Sociology , Wiesbaden 2011, pp. 179–206.
  • Stephen Holmes: Leo Strauss: Truths only for philosophers In: Ders .: Die Anatomie des Antiliberalismus , Hamburg 1995, pp. 115–159
  • Markus Kartheininger: heterogeneity. Political philosophy in the early work of Leo Strauss Munich: Fink, 2006. ISBN 978-3-7705-4378-6
  • Markus Kartheininger: Aristocratization of the mind . In: Kartheininger, Markus; Hutter, Axel (ed.): Education as a means and an end in itself. Corrective reminder against the narrowing of the concept of education , Freiburg, 2009, pp. 157–208. ISBN 978-3-495-48393-0
  • Clemens Kauffmann : Leo Strauss for an introduction . 2nd Edition. Junius, Hamburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-88506-963-8 .
  • Clemens Kauffmann: Anti-Traditionalism: The "History of Ideas Program" by Leo Strauss , in: Bluhm, Harald; Gebhardt, Jürgen (Ed.): Political history of ideas in the 20th century: Concepts and criticism . Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2006, pp. 125–153. (Series of publications by the Political Theories and History of Ideas section in the German Association for Political Science; Vol. 8).
  • Clemens Kaufmann: "There are many powerful things, but nothing is more powerful than humans". Notes on the history of the works on a high school diploma thesis by Leo Strauss (with facsimile and transcription by Andrea Jördens and Gereon Becht-Jördens), in: Erdmute Johanna Pickerodt Uthleb (Ed.): 475 years of grammar school Philippinum. The future needs experience. A Festschrift , Gymnasium Philippinum, Marburg 2002, pp. 103–126 ISBN 3-9800174-1-9
  • Peter G. Kielmansegg, Horst Mewes, Elisabeth Glaser-Schmidt (Eds.): Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss: German Émigrés and American Political Thought After World War II New York: GHI, 1995 (Series: Publications of the German Historical Institute, Vol . 10) (English) TB 1997. ISBN 0-521-47082-X
  • Till Kinzel: Platonic cultural criticism in America. Studies on Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind . Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 2002
  • Heinrich Meier : Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss and the concept of the political. To a dialogue among those absent. Stuttgart 1988. - Erw. Neuausg. - Stuttgart / Weimar: JB Metzler Verlag, 1998, ISBN 3-476-01602-1
  • Heinrich Meier: The thought movement of Leo Strauss. The history of philosophy and the philosopher's intention. JB Metzler Verlag, Stuttgart-Weimar, 2000, ISBN 3-476-01504-1
  • Heinrich Meier: The theological-political problem. On the subject of Leo Strauss. Metzler, Stuttgart, 2003, ISBN 3-476-01962-4
  • Thomas Meyer, politics for the initiated. News about Leo Strauss: A literature review in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , January 18, 2007, p. N3
  • Peter J. Opitz: Faith and Knowledge. The correspondence between Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss from 1934 to 1964 , Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Munich ISBN 978-3-7705-4967-2
  • Emile Perreau-Saussine: Athéisme et politique , Critique, 2008, n ° 728-729, p. 121-135
  • Thomas Pangle: Leo Strauss: An Introduction to his Thought and Intellectual Legacy (2006).
  • Irene Abigail Piccinini. Una guida fedele. L'influenza di Hermann Cohen sul pensiero di Leo Strauss . Torino: Grapes, 2007. ISBN 978-88-89909-31-7 .
  • Leander Scholz: Beyond Liberalism: Giorgio Agamben and the Critique of Modern Political Philosophy by Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt , in: Janine Bröckelmann / Frank Meier (eds.): Die gouvernementale machine. On the political philosophy of Giorgio Agambens , Münster: Unrast 2007, pp. 166–188.
  • Eugene R. Sheppard, Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile:: The Making of a Political Philosopher , Brandeis University Press, 2006, ISBN 1-58465-600-X
  • Gerhard Spörl: The Leo Conservatives. In: "Der Spiegel", 32/2003.
  • Stephan Steiner: Weimar in America. Leo Strauss' Political Philosophy, (series of scientific treatises of the Leo Baeck Institute 76). Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2013. ISBN 978-3-16-152674-9 . (Zugl .: Erfurt, Univ., Diss., 2012)
  • Bradley C. Thompson (with Yaron Brook): Neoconservatism. An Obituary for an Idea . Paradigm Publishers, Boulder / London 2010, ISBN 978-1-59451-831-7 , pp. 55-131.
  • William HF Altman, The German Stranger. Leo Strauss and National Socialism . Lexington Books, Lanham, Md. 2010, ISBN 978-0-7391-4737-5 .
  • Raphael Major (Ed.): Leo Strauss's Defense of the Philosophic Life: Reading "What is Political Philosophy?" . University of Chicago Press, 2013, ISBN 978-0-226-92420-5
  • Ulrike Weichert: “From history to nature”. The Political Hermeneutics by Leo Strauss (Philosophische Schriften PHS, Volume 81) . Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-428-14162-3 .
  • Heinrich Meier: The renewal of philosophy and the challenge of the revealed religion. On the intention of Leo Strauss' 'Thoughts on Machiavelli' , in id .: Political Philosophy and the Challenge of the Revelation Religion . CH Beck, Munich 2013.
  • Hannes Kerber: Strauss and Schleiermacher on How to Read Plato: An Introduction to 'Exoteric Teaching' , in: Martin Yaffe / Richard Ruderman (Eds.): Reorientation: Leo Strauss in the 1930s . Palgrave, New York 2014, ISBN 978-1-137-37423-3 .
  • Hannes Kerber: Leo Strauss and esoteric-exoteric writing . In: Enlightenment & Criticism 26/3, 2019, pp. 72–92.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ see Hessisches Staatsarchiv Marburg (HStAMR), Best. 915 No. 5000, p. 48 ( digitized version ).
  2. ↑ See Kauffmann 2002, p. below literature.
  3. ↑ Leo Strauss: The Early Writings, translated and edited by Michael Zank, SUNY Series in the Jewish Thought of Leo Strauss, ed. Kenneth H. Green, Albany: SUNY Press. 2002, ISBN 978-0-7914-5329-2 , 3ff., 72.
  4. ^ A b Meier, Heinrich: The theological-political problem. On the subject of Leo Strauss. Metzler, Stuttgart, 2003, ISBN 3-476-01962-4 , p. 18.
  5. ↑ Norbert Bolz: The real life. (PDF) SWR2 Essay, November 18, 2013, accessed on May 28, 2017 .
  6. ↑ Hannes Kerber: Leo Strauss and the esoteric-exoteric writing , in: Enlightenment & Criticism 26: 3 (2019), pp. 72-92. ( academia.edu [accessed September 16, 2019]).
personal data
SURNAME Strauss, Leo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH September 20, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Kirchhain
DATE OF DEATH 18th October 1973
Place of death Annapolis , Maryland , USA