Strauss, Leo (1899—1973)
German-born Jewish-American political philosopher, generally regarded as the ‘father’ of neoconservative thinking. He completed his PhD at the University of Hamburg under the direction of Ernst Cassirer in 1921. He also took classes at Freiburg, where his teachers included Husserl, Edmund and Heidegger, Martin. He was active in the Zionist movement in Germany and intellectually engaged with several of its key figures, such as Franz Rosenzweig and Gershom Scholem. He left Germany in 1932 to go to the US on a Rockefeller Fellowship, but because of the rise of Nazism chose not to return to Germany at the fellowship’s conclusion. Instead he went to Paris, and then Cambridge, before resolving finally to relocate to the US, which he did in 1937. After several years of precarious living on short-term contracts at a variety of universities, he finally attained a tenured position at the University of Chicago, which is where he really made his mark with several books that offered both a rereading of the history of philosophy from Plato to cathexis and a coherent political doctrine. It was the latter aspect (reinforced by the first) that was to prove the most influential. Strauss’s principal themes were, according to Anderson, Perry’s incisive critique in Spectrum (2005), that a just order must be based on the demands of natural right and that nature is inherently unequal. The best political regime, he reasoned, is one that takes human inequality into account and is led by a select elite. It is not difficult to see why this appeals to neoconservatives. Strauss tends to be better remembered for who his students were, rather than for specific books or ideas: his students included Bloom, Allan, Paul Wolfowitz (a key figure in George W. Bush’s administration), and Sontag, Susan. He is also cited as an important influence by Fukuyama, Francis.