Nietzsche, Schmitt, and Heidegger in the Anti-Liberalism of Leo Strauss

Abstract

After emigrating to the United States, Leo Strauss taught political philosophy for thirty years, first at the New School for Social Research in New York and then at the University of Chicago, before retiring at St. John's College. Richard Wolin observes that he “seems to have deeply mistrusted day-to-day politics—a very strange stance, to be sure, for someone who made his living teaching political philosophy.”1 But is it really so strange? What in his German Gymnasium education, or his participation in the Zionist movement, would have prepared him for the peculiarities of day-to-day American politics? Strauss did not underestimate the…