For many, Leo Strauss is a man of mystery. Was he, as Myles Burnyeat of Cambridge University suggested many years ago in The New York Review of Books, a “sphinx without a secret”, not a genuine philosopher but rather a proponent of “ruthless anti-idealism” who provided intellectual backing for an aggressive American foreign policy?
Kevin MacDonald takes a different view, holding that “Strauss crafted his vision of an aristocratic elite manipulating the masses as a Jewish survival strategy.”(MacDonald, Cultural Insurrections, Occidental Press 2007, p.163).
In his illuminating book Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America: A Critical Appraisal. , the distinguished intellectual historian Paul Gottfried rejects what these approaches have in common: their picture of Strauss as an enemy of liberal democracy. Though Strauss earned the respect of the rightwing legal theorist Carl Schmitt, he was by no means, Gottfried maintains, a man of the Right. To the contrary, and despite some ambiguous remarks made early in his career, he remained throughout his long sojourn in America a convinced liberal democrat.
Gottfried traces the misapprehension to Strauss’s popular lectures in 1949 for the Walgreen Foundation, published in 1953 as Natural Right and History. Strauss appeared to many as the vindicator of natural law against the relativism and nihilism that threatened to weaken America in its Cold War against communism. Gottfried writes:
“A one-time teacher of mine, Anton Hermann Chroust...used to joke about Strauss’s visit to South Bend: ‘The natural law Catholics came out in force, and as soon as St. Leo started talking, they were like Moses receiving the Law.’”
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