Eugene R. Sheppard.Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile: The Making of a Political Philosopher.:Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile: The Making of a Political Philosopher.(The Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry.)

Abstract

Eugene R. Sheppard's study examines Leo Strauss, the Jew, the German, the Zionist, the critic of liberalism, and above all the philosopher. The Strauss that emerges from this meticulous study is a fervent conservative and an eclectic voice. Simultaneously shaped by the multiplicity of biographical, historical, and philosophical contexts, Strauss bridged some of the most extreme Weimar philosophical traditions in his own work. Born into rural Hesse in the small town of Kirchhain, raised in a middle-class Jewish family, Strauss grew up within a Jewish community of religious observance and patriotism, a conservative region in which political antisemitism found receptive listeners. Recalling his childhood in a Zionist article, Strauss believed that the rural Hessen communities had “remained virtually untouched by the liberal Reform movement” (p. 10) in the nineteenth century. For him, his place of origin informed his philosophical and political views. Kirchhain also placed him in geographical proximity to the neo-Kantian and Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen, whose philosophical work continued to emanate from Marburg even after his retirement in 1912. Strauss shared with many other German Jewish intellectuals of the period a great admiration for the Jewish neo-Kantian “because he was a passionate philosopher and a Jew devoted to Judaism” (p. 14).