Leo Strauss on Social and Natural Science: Two Previously Unpublished Papers

Abstract

The two papers published here for the first time were written by Leo Strauss (1899–1973) in or around 1945, when he was teaching at the New School for Social Research in New York City. One of Strauss's colleagues at the New School was Kurt Riezler (1882–1955). Riezler had earned a PhD in classics, but had an even more distinguished career as a practical politician; he had been a high-ranking cabinet member in both Imperial and Weimar Germany and a drafter of the Weimar constitution. He had wide-ranging scholarly interests, having written books on the theoretical foundations of politics, art, ancient philosophy, and the fundamental structure of social life. Because they shared an interest in the foundations of social science, he and Strauss co-taught a couple of courses in the mid-1940s (on Aristotle's De anima and Descartes's Passions of the Soul [along with Solomon Asch], and on Plato's Theaetetus [along with Alexandre Koyré]). Strauss indicated the enduring respect he had for Riezler in a eulogy he wrote for him in 1955 and republished as the concluding essay in What Is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies in 1959.