Leo Strauss Was a Theorist of Counterrevolution

It’s said that the Chicago philosophy professor Leo Strauss liked to drop his smoking paraphernalia from the table to test whether his doctoral students would pick it up for him. If this doesn’t cast him as the best person, a wider contempt for the masses shines through from his work itself. But Strauss was also one of the cleverest enemies of equality, freedom, and democracy. His critique of liberalism was razor-sharp — and earned him the respect of socialist opponents Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem.

Born 125 years ago in the small town of Kirchhain, near Marburg, Strauss was the son of an Orthodox Jewish merchant family. After studying philosophy in Hamburg, he completed his doctorate under the neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer and then worked at Berlin’s Higher Institute for Jewish Studies until 1932. Driven out of Germany faced with rising Nazism, Strauss became famous as a patron saint of US conservatism who warned his new homeland against the corrosive effect of the German spirit of Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

Strauss’s thinking is closely linked to the so-called Conservative Revolution, which also included the legal scholar Carl Schmitt and the philosopher Martin Heidegger, with whom Strauss studied for a time in Marburg. Strauss work is partly an attempt to deal with the fact that this anti-modern current’s key thinkers were rabid antisemites who ideologically prepared fascism and, after Hitler was handed power, justified the persecution of the Jews and even actively enforced it through their academic positions. Strauss sought to transplant the Right’s authoritarian spirit, responsible for white terror, fascism, world war, and the Holocaust, from Germany to the United States. He translated it from…