At one point in his life, Leo Strauss felt compelled to take an “explicit” stand toward Martin Heidegger. The reasons were a mixture of the personal and the philosophical: As a young university student, Strauss was deeply impressed by Heidegger's “seriousness, profundity, and concentration in the interpretation of philosophic texts.” There “had been no such phenomenon in the world since Hegel.” Strauss gradually became aware of the “breath of the revolution of thought” prepared by Heidegger. Moreover, he came to sympathize with crucial facets of that revolution. Increasingly, Strauss also thought in terms of a “crisis of the West,” rather than subscribing to the pervasive belief in Western progress and enlightenment. Like Heidegger, Strauss recognized the self-destructive nature of modern rationality and the philosophical limits of modern natural science. And like Heidegger, he returned to Greek antiquity to gain the vantage point from which to properly comprehend the essence of modernity.

It is in their respective understandings or interpretations of Greek philosophy, however, that the profound divergence between Strauss and Heidegger most clearly emerges. To put their differences in a nutshell: Strauss's lifework consisted of a “return to classical political philosophy” (emphasis added), that was both “necessary and tentative or experimental.”

PETER GRAF KIELMANSEGG: I propose to begin with questions concerning the intellectual and cultural background, that is, the origins, roots, and connections between Hannah Arendt's and Leo Strauss's thinking. Next, we could revisit the question of what could be called the Americanization of Arendt and Strauss, that is, the question of the extent to which the books they wrote in this country reflect the fact that these authors have become Americans. And third, I suggest that we take up a topic of more general relevance, namely, the relationship of Arendt and Strauss to democracy. They experienced the failure of democracy in Germany, had an existential encounter with a totalitarian dictatorship, and eventually became citizens of a successful republic. Many of our questions could be brought into this context, by which I do not mean that their biographies are necessarily the most important factors in explaining their attitudes toward democracy; but it is perhaps one way of looking at the problem.