Leo Strauss on Farabi, Maimonides, et al. in the 1930S

Abstract

The end of the 1930s marked a turning point in Strauss’s thought that Daniel Tanguay has aptly called his “Farabian Turn.”¹ Although Strauss’s most extended work on Farabi, Maimonides, et al. in the 1930s is Philosophy and Law (1935),² the turn Tanguay identifies is more evident in the smaller pieces that came out in the wake of Philosophy and Law—including “Some Remarks on the Political Science of Maimonides and Farabi” (1936)³ but especially “The Place of the Doctrine of Providence according to Maimonides” (1937).⁴ In these two pieces, Strauss evinces a growing awareness of the depth of Maimonides’s debt to Farabi. Tanguay identifies two main features of the Farabian Turn: the focus on the political in Maimonides and a growing awareness of the centrality of esotericism. Prior to the Turn, in Philosophy and Law, Strauss elevated two features in his interpretation of Maimonides that fade into the background as early as the two pieces written in 1936 and 1937: the importance of Avicenna’s account of prophecy and Maimonides’s apparent reliance on supernatural resources for knowledge of things beyond the limit of natural human knowledge. Beginning in 1936, Strauss avoids any suggestion that the supernatural plays such a role.⁵