Leo Strauss

Leo Strauss''s controversial writings have long exercised a profound subterranean cultural influence. Now their impact is emerging into broad daylight, where they have been met with a flurry of poorly informed, often wildly speculative, and sometimes rather paranoid pronouncements.

This book, written as a corrective, is the first accurate, non-polemical, comprehensive guide to Strauss''s mature political philosophy and its intellectual influence. Thomas L. Pangle opens a pathway into Strauss''s major works with one question: How does Strauss''s philosophic thinking contribute to our democracy''s civic renewal and to our culture''s deepening, critical self-understanding?

This book includes a synoptic critical survey of writings from scholars who have extended Strauss''s influence into the more practical, sub-philosophic fields of social and political science and commentary. Pangle shows how these analysts have in effect imported Straussian impulses into a "new" kind of political and social science.