Leo Strauss on Modern Political Science:Two Previously Unpublished Manuscripts

Abstract

The two manuscripts published here for the first time were written by Leo Strauss: the first in 1956 and the second between 1957 and 1962. The first, entitled “Lecture in Milwaukee: Michigan Midwest Political Science,” was written for the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Midwest Conference of Political Scientists on May 4, 1956, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The second is an unpublished passage of “An Epilogue” Strauss wrote for Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics, published in 1962. Together these pieces improve our understanding of both the context in which Strauss developed his critique of the new political science and the audience to whom that critique was addressed. These two texts are of “biographical” interest. They are biographical in the sense that they clarify Strauss's thought and its evolution. The “Lecture in Milwaukee” clarifies the context in which Strauss's critique of modern political science was born: confrontation with the political scientists of the 1950s, here represented by Glendon Schubert who is not mentioned in Strauss's published writings. Without this lecture one might overlook the reference to “extrasensory perception” in the ironical discussion of “our man in Missouri” in “Epilogue.” The critique of Arthur Bentley, Bernard Berelson, Harold Laswell, and Herbert Simon by Strauss's students also takes on new meaning if read in the light of this lecture's references and Schubert's published article. Aside from Strauss's view of academia in the 1950s, his references in the lecture to the British Labour Party's policy toward Nazi Germany, to postwar American disarmament, and to prison reform and immigration policy in the United States provide rare and thus important information about Strauss's political views and judgment.