Socrates and the Drama of Western Civilization

Abstract

Reconstructing the political philosophy of Leo Strauss would be an impossible task were it not for the fact that he undoubtedly regarded classical thought as the repository of human wisdom and truth. Strauss presents himself as a classicist. He criticizes the moderns and defends the ancients; he uses ‘classic natural right’ as the standard by which to criticize modernity. He laments the decline of the wisdom of classical antiquity. But we cannot understand what it means to think of Strauss as a classicist unless we realize the extent to which his interpretation of the classics turns the conventional understanding of classical thought on its head.