Leo Strauss

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Lore & Background

Leo Strauss was born on September 20, 1899, in Kirchhain, Hesse-Nassau, Kingdom of Prussia, to Jennie Strauss (née David) and Hugo Strauss. He noted he came from a "conservative, even orthodox Jewish home" but one which knew little about Judaism except strict adherence to ceremonial laws. After attending the Kirchhain Volksschule and the Protestant Rektoratsschule, he enrolled at the Gymnasium Philippinum in Marburg in 1912, graduating in 1917. He served in the German army during World War I from July 5, 1917, to December 1918. He earned his doctorate at the University of Hamburg in 1921, supervised by Ernst Cassirer, and attended courses by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. He worked for the German Zionist movement and befriended many German Jewish intellectuals, including Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and Gershom Scholem. His closest friend was Jacob Klein. After receiving a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1932, Strauss left his position at the Higher Institute for Jewish Studies in Berlin for Paris. He returned to Germany only once, for a few short days, twenty years later. In Paris, he married Marie (Miriam) Bernsohn, a widow with a young child. He adopted her son, Thomas, and later his sister's child, Jenny Strauss Clay. He found temporary employment at the University of Cambridge in England in 1935 with the help of his in-law David Daube. Unable to find permanent work in England, he moved to the United States in 1937 under the patronage of Harold Laski. He held positions at Columbia University, the New School for Social Research (1938–1948), and became a professor of political science at the University of Chicago from 1949 to 1969, holding the Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professorship. He became a U.S. citizen in 1944. In 1953, Strauss coined the phrase "reductio ad Hitlerum." After Chicago, he taught at Claremont McKenna College for a year in 1969, then at St. John's College, Annapolis, in 1970, where he was the Scott Buchanan Distinguished Scholar in Residence until his death from pneumonia in 1973. He was buried in Annapolis Hebrew Cemetery.

Reader's Guide

Leo Strauss's significance lies in his profound influence on twentieth-century American political theory and the study of classical political thought. His central claim—that philosophers often wrote esoterically, presenting different teachings to general and specialist readers—reshaped interpretations of ancient and medieval texts. He argued that modernity, beginning with Niccolò Machiavelli, represented a radical break from classical philosophy, leading to a crisis of nihilism, relativism, historicism, and scientism. Strauss sought to recover classical political philosophy as a corrective to this crisis. His seminars at the University of Chicago from 1949 to 1969 shaped several generations of political theorists, many of whom became influential scholars at major American universities and played significant roles in the neoconservative movement. His major works include Natural Right and History (1953), Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952), The City and Man (1964), and On Tyranny (1948). His scholarship spanned Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, Friedrich Nietzsche, and medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophers such as Al-Farabi and Maimonides. Central to his thought are the tension between reason and revelation, the nature of political prudence, and the relationship between philosophy and political authority. His methodological emphasis on close textual reading, the pedagogical value of classical texts, and the critique of modernity formed the basis of what came to be known as "Straussian" approaches to political theory. His work remains debated, including disputes over his interpretations of ancient texts and the political influence of his students.

Did You Know?

• Strauss coined the phrase 'reductio ad Hitlerum' in 1953, a play on 'reductio ad absurdum,' suggesting that comparing an argument to one of Hitler's is often a fallacy of irrelevance.
• He served in the German army during World War I from July 5, 1917, to December 1918.
• His doctoral thesis at the University of Hamburg in 1921 was supervised by Ernst Cassirer and titled 'On the Problem of Knowledge in the Philosophical Doctrine of F. H. Jacobi.'
• Strauss adopted his wife's son, Thomas, and later his sister's child, Jenny Strauss Clay, who became a professor of classics at the University of Virginia.
• Psalm 114 was read at his funeral service at the request of family and friends.