How Strauss Became Strauss

Abstract

Among the great philosophers of the twentieth century, political philosophy had only one advocate. For a long time it seemed to have been dispensed with by history or to have fallen into oblivion, thus to have become a thing of the past in every sense. That political philosophy has been recognized to have a present and ultimately a future is the achievement of Leo Strauss. It is especially this achievement that marks his place in the history of philosophy. And it alone would suffice to draw the keen attention of later philosophers to his oeuvre. For nothing less than their own most, their vital and rightly understood self-interest is in question with the disappearance or the recovery of political philosophy. Yet the revolution of thought that Strauss brought about single-handedly has a prehistory. The revolution is preceded by a periagoge, or a decisive turn, in Strauss’s thought, just as political philosophy itself is based on a periagoge in philosophy. Whoever would like to understand this turn better, whoever is interested in how Strauss became Strauss, can now—with the aid of the first three volumes of his Gesammelte Schriften, which appeared between 1996 and 2001 and which come to some 2,000 pages, nearly half of which contain previously unpublished texts and letters—retrace step by step the path of thought that Strauss traversed in the formative period of his philosophy.¹