What is the significance for the understanding of the American Founding of Leo Strauss's efforts toward the recovery of classical political philosophy? That this is a legitimate question to address to Strauss's work is suggested by the claims which he made in the introductions to a number of his most famous books (among other things). He opened his study on Natural Right and History, for example, by raising the question whether our nation “in its maturity still cherish[es] the faith in which it was conceived and raised,” that is, whether it still holds the fundamental proposition of the Declaration of Independence to be true. In doing so, he gave warrant to the expectation that that study, which may be said to culminate in a treatment of classical natural right and make a case for its superiority to all alternatives, would contribute to the strengthening or restoration of our Founding faith.

Although Leo Strauss spent the better part of his scholarly career in the United States, his name remained essentially unknown in this country during his lifetime outside the rather restricted academic circles of political science and Judaic studies. Only in recent years — owing, positively, to the best-selling status achieved by a book by one of his students, Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind; and negatively, to several critical reviews of his thought and influence in the semi-popular media —has Strauss's name been publicized to a somewhat wider audience. This article is a response to two of the critiques: Gordon Wood's relatively moderate “The Fundamentalists and the Constitution,” published in the New York Review of Books (18 February 1988), and Stephen Taylor Holmes's less restrained “Truths for Philosophers Alone?”, which appeared in the Times Literary Supplement (1–7 December 1989)

The work of Leo Strauss is not typical of American academics. He has explicitly rejected the premises and methodologies of modern scholarship. In its stead, he claims to have rediscovered other, more ancient methods of discovery to guide his research. As a result, his conclusions do not necessarily reconfirm what we think we already know. Hence his work represents a challenge to current scholarship. For if Strauss 's conclusions are true, then a radical rethinking of the history of philosophy, political philosophy and psychology is required. It would be much easier if we could simply say that Strauss's methods and conclusions are wholly misguided.

Heinrich Meier 's careful and illuminating study of the relation between Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss should come as something of a revelation to many* Through a painstaking analysis of the three editions of Schmitt's influential Concept of the Political, Meier uncovers a heretofore largely overlooked “dialogue,” albeit one partly conducted “in absentia.”

As Meier observes Schmitt is one of a relatively small number of contemporaries whose work Strauss publicly reviewed. The first edition of Schmitt's essay appeared in 1927; a second was published in 1932, and it is to this that Strauss's 1932 “Comments” is (openly) addressed. A second was published in 1932. A third edition, published in 1933, presents, on Meier's reading, Schmitt's implicit response. For a variety of reasons, not the least being Schmitt's increasing involvement with the National Socialists, Strauss's role as interlocutor went largely unacknowledged, it being “impossible,” as Strauss would later write, for Schmitt to admit his “dependence on a Jew” (p. 138).

Leo Strauss has long had a “scholarly” presence among French orientalists and medievalists, thanks to his fundamentally important works on the falasifa and Maimonides, two of which were published in France in the 1930's. To French political “thinkers,” caught as they were for so long, like Laocoon, in the serpentine toils of Stalinism, Maoism and other variants of “Marxism,” including its decadently ironic postmodern negations, Strauss seems to have been a largely unknown name. Some interpreters of the history of modern political philosophy have, of course, taken note of his analyses of Machiavelli, for example, and the French translation of Natural Right and History was in fact first published in 1954.