Leo Strauss

An Introduction to His Thought and Intellectual Legacy

Thomas L. Pangle

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9780801889585
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophers

Leo Strauss's controversial writings have long exercised a profound subterranean cultural influence. Now their impact is emerging into broad daylight, where they have been met with a flurry of poorly informed, often wildly speculative, and sometimes rather paranoid pronouncements.

This book, written as a corrective, is the first accurate, non-polemical, comprehensive guide to Strauss's mature political philosophy and its intellectual influence. Thomas L. Pangle opens a pathway into Strauss's major works with one question: How does Strauss's philosophic thinking contribute to our democracy's civic renewal and to our culture's deepening, critical self-understanding?

This book includes a synoptic critical survey of writings from scholars who have extended Strauss's influence into the more practical, sub-philosophic fields of social and political science and commentary. Pangle shows how these analysts have in effect imported Straussian impulses into a "new" kind of political and social science.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowlegments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Relativism: The Crux of Our Liberal Culture
• Chapter 2 The Revival of Classical Political Philosophy
• Chapter 3 The Rediscovery and Reassessment of the Foundations of Modernity
• Chapter 4 Strauss’s Legacy in Political Science
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index