Leo Strauss

Leo Strauss (1899-1973) was born to an Orthodox Jewish family in Kirchhain, Germany, studied under Ernst Cassirer and was drawn to the work of Husserl and Heidegger. He left Germany in 1932 on a Rockefeller fellowship, worked in France and England, and moved to the United States in 1937, becoming a citizen in 1944. He taught at the New School for Social Research and from 1949 at the University of Chicago, later teaching at Claremont and St. John's College. His books include On Tyranny (1948), Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952), Natural Right and History (1953) and Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958).

Admirers credit Strauss with reviving the serious study of classical and medieval political philosophy and with a demanding method of close reading, and his students and their students became an influential school in American political science. Critics have accused him of elitism and of teaching that a wise few may deceive the many, or of writing esoterically himself, readings his defenders reject. In the 2000s some commentators called him the intellectual godfather of neoconservatism and even of the Iraq War, because some officials and writers had studied with his students; scholars such as the authors of the Stanford Encyclopedia entry regard that link as weak, since his work does not address policy.