---
alias:
- Leo Strauss
- Strauss
born: 1899-09-20
category: Scientists & Researchers
created: 2026-06-20
died: 1973-10-18
location: Kirchhain, Germany; Chicago, Illinois
summary: Leo Strauss was a German-American political philosopher at the University
  of Chicago whose doctrine of esoteric writing, critique of liberal modernity, and
  revival of the ancients shaped American neoconservatism and supplied one of the
  three pillars of Peter Thiel's 2007 essay 'The Straussian Moment.'
tags:
- Person
- LeoStrauss
- PoliticalPhilosophy
- Esotericism
- Neoconservatism
- PeterThiel
updated: 2026-06-20
---

Leo Strauss (September 20, 1899 to October 18, 1973) was a German-born political philosopher who taught for nearly two decades at the University of Chicago and who founded the school of interpretation known as Straussianism. His central claims were that the great philosophers of the past practiced esoteric writing, concealing a dangerous teaching beneath a salutary surface; that modern liberal philosophy represents a decline from classical political philosophy; and that the conflict between reason and revelation, which he called the theological-political problem, is the permanent theme of Western thought. His students and their students became a recognizable presence in American conservatism, and his name attaches to the intellectual genealogy of neoconservatism. [Peter Thiel](/people/peter-thiel/) titled his 2007 essay "The Straussian Moment" after him.[^1][^2]

### Life and Career

Strauss was born in Kirchhain, in Hesse, into an observant Jewish family, and studied at the University of Marburg and the University of Hamburg, taking his doctorate in 1921 with a dissertation on the epistemology of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi supervised by the neo-Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer. In the early 1920s he attended the Freiburg lectures of Edmund Husserl and encountered the early work of Martin Heidegger, whom he regarded for the rest of his life as the most formidable thinker of the age. He worked at the Academy for Jewish Research in Berlin, where he edited part of the jubilee edition of Moses Mendelssohn, and published his first book, *Spinoza's Critique of Religion*, in 1930.[^1][^3]

In 1932 a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship took Strauss out of Germany to France and then England, and he never returned; the rise of the Nazi regime in 1933 made his exile permanent. He completed *The Political Philosophy of Hobbes* in England, emigrated to the United States in 1937, and from 1938 to 1948 taught at the New School for Social Research in New York. In 1949 he joined the University of Chicago, where he was Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor and taught until 1967, the period in which he trained the bulk of his students and produced his major interpretive works. He spent a year at Claremont Men's College in 1968 and then moved to St. John's College in Annapolis as scholar in residence, where he died in 1973.[^1][^3]

### Esoteric Writing and Persecution

Strauss's most distinctive doctrine, set out in *Persecution and the Art of Writing* (1952), holds that under conditions of persecution philosophers learned to write on two levels at once. The surface, or exoteric, teaching conformed to the moral and religious opinions of the city and protected the author from reprisal, while a hidden, or esoteric, teaching, addressed to careful readers and signaled by deliberate contradictions, omissions, and errors, communicated the philosopher's real and potentially subversive thought. Strauss developed the reading through studies of Maimonides, Judah Halevi, and Spinoza, arguing that modern scholars had lost the very art of reading "between the lines" that earlier readers took for granted.[^4][^5]

Behind the contingent fact of persecution Strauss placed a permanent tension between philosophy and the political community. Philosophy questions the authoritative opinions on which any society rests, and so the pursuit of truth is always potentially corrosive of the beliefs that hold a city together. The classical solution, in Strauss's account, was a politic reticence: the philosopher tempers the public expression of the truth and grants the city the salutary myths it requires, a posture connected to the Platonic notion of the noble lie, the gennaion pseudos of the *Republic*, the medicinal falsehood the rulers tell for the good of the whole. Critics, notably Shadia Drury in *The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss* (1988), read this as an esoteric endorsement of rule by a deceiving elite, a reading Strauss's defenders dispute.[^4][^6]

### The Critique of Modernity

Strauss argued that classical political philosophy, oriented by an idea of the naturally best regime and the question of how one ought to live, was abandoned by modern thought in favor of lower but supposedly more solid foundations. In *Natural Right and History* (1953) he traced the collapse of the classical doctrine of natural right into modern natural rights and then into the historicism and value-relativism he regarded as the characteristic disease of the twentieth century, a relativism he thought left liberal democracy defenseless against its enemies. He described modernity as unfolding in "three waves," the first beginning with Machiavelli and Hobbes, the second with Rousseau, the third with Nietzsche, each lowering the horizon further until thought arrived at the nihilism he associated with Heidegger.[^2][^7]

The recovery he proposed was a return to the ancients, achieved by reading Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, and the medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophers on their own terms rather than through the assumptions of progress. Works such as *On Tyranny* (1948), a commentary on Xenophon's *Hiero* that occasioned his published exchange with the Hegelian Alexandre Kojeve, *Thoughts on Machiavelli* (1958), and *The City and Man* (1964) enacted this return. Underlying all of it was what Strauss called the theological-political problem, the unresolved quarrel between the claims of reason ("Athens") and the claims of revelation ("Jerusalem"), which he held no philosophy had ever refuted and which he treated as the animating tension of the Western tradition.[^7][^8]

### The Schmitt Exchange

In 1932 Strauss published "Notes on Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political," a close and critical review of the jurist [Carl Schmitt](/people/carl-schmitt/)'s book. Strauss argued that Schmitt, in seeking to ground the political in the friend-enemy distinction and to escape the liberalism he attacked, in fact remained within the liberal horizon he wished to overcome, because he could give no positive account of why the political was worth affirming. Schmitt privately praised the review as the one penetrating response his book had received, revised passages of the third edition in light of it, and supplied a recommendation that supported Strauss's Rockefeller fellowship.[^9]

The German scholar Heinrich Meier reconstructed this episode in *Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue* (German 1988, English 1995), arguing that the exchange concerned, beneath its ostensible subject, the deeper quarrel between political philosophy and political theology. Thiel set the two thinkers' names side by side in "The Straussian Moment."[^9][^10]

### Students, Neoconservatism, and the Straussian Moment

Strauss trained a large cohort of students at Chicago, among them Allan Bloom, Harvey Mansfield (at Harvard), Harry Jaffa, and Walter Berns, and a later generation including the analyst Paul Wolfowitz and the journalist William Kristol moved into government and the policy press, which is why commentators traced a line from Strauss to the foreign policy of the [George W. Bush](/people/george-w-bush/) administration, though the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that Strauss's own writing addressed no policy questions. The "Straussian" reading also split into rival camps, an East Coast school around Mansfield and an interpretively bolder West Coast school around Jaffa and the Claremont Institute, which became influential on the Trump-era right.[^2][^11]

Thiel's "The Straussian Moment," published in *Politics and Apocalypse* (2007), takes Strauss as one of three twentieth-century thinkers, with Schmitt and [Rene Girard](/people/rene-girard/), who saw past the optimistic anthropology of Enlightenment liberalism. Thiel reads the September 11 attacks as evidence that the Hobbesian and Lockean account of human beings as fearful, economically motivated, and threatened only by recognized states had failed, and he invokes Strauss's distinction between the exoteric surface and the esoteric core to argue that the modern state conceals its hardest necessities, a logic he extends to covert intelligence and to the surveillance work of his company Palantir. The essay treats the Straussian recovery of the ancients as possibly the last and best resource of the West while voicing the suspicion, drawn from Girard, that even the Straussian moment of triumph may prove brief.[^12][^13]

[^1]: "Leo Strauss," *Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,* on the Kirchhain birth, the 1921 Hamburg doctorate under Ernst Cassirer, Husserl and Heidegger, the Berlin and New School years, and the Chicago career. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/strauss-leo/
[^2]: "Leo Strauss," *Encyclopædia Britannica,* on Straussianism, the critique of modernity, and the disputed line to neoconservatism. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leo-Strauss
[^3]: Strauss, Leo. *Spinoza's Critique of Religion* (1930); *The Political Philosophy of Hobbes* (1936).
[^4]: Strauss, Leo. *Persecution and the Art of Writing.* Free Press, 1952.
[^5]: "Morality, Nature, and Esotericism in Leo Strauss's Persecution and the Art of Writing," *The Review of Politics,* Cambridge, on the strong and weak accounts of esotericism. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/review-of-politics/article/abs/morality-nature-and-esotericism-in-leo-strausss-persecution-and-the-art-of-writing/AE252D909A9FE588A1ADED672DFA6C0F
[^6]: Drury, Shadia B. *The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss.* St. Martin's Press, 1988. See also Drury, "The Esoteric Philosophy of Leo Strauss," *Political Theory* 13, no. 3 (1985).
[^7]: Strauss, Leo. *Natural Right and History.* University of Chicago Press, 1953; and "The Three Waves of Modernity," in *An Introduction to Political Philosophy* (1989).
[^8]: Strauss, Leo. *On Tyranny* (1948, rev. ed. with the Kojève exchange 1963); *Thoughts on Machiavelli* (1958); *The City and Man* (1964).
[^9]: Strauss, Leo. "Notes on Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political" (1932), reprinted in *Spinoza's Critique of Religion* and in Meier's volume below; on Schmitt's June 1932 praise and the third-edition revisions. https://contemporarythinkers.org/leo-strauss/essay/notes-on-carl-schmitt-the-concept-of-the-political/
[^10]: Meier, Heinrich. *Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue,* trans. J. Harvey Lomax. University of Chicago Press, 1995.
[^11]: "Leo Strauss," *Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,* rejecting the claim that Strauss is responsible for Iraq-war policy and noting his work "does not concern policy issues of any sort." https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/strauss-leo/
[^12]: Thiel, Peter. "The Straussian Moment," in *Politics and Apocalypse,* ed. Robert Hamerton-Kelly, Michigan State University Press, 2007, pp. 189 to 218.
[^13]: "Peter Thiel's The Straussian Moment Explained," summary of the essay's use of Strauss, Schmitt, and Girard, the September 11 framing, and the esoteric concealment argument. https://vistasofinsight.substack.com/p/peter-thiels-the-straussian-moment