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It is true of many important contemporary thinkers that they are controversial: often, what makes thinkers important is precisely that they say controversial things. What is especially challenging about Leo Strauss, however, is that the controversy surrounding him is often about what his position actually was. In both the secondary literature and the popular press, there is basic disagreement about what Strauss was in fact arguing.

Trying to provide an introduction to the thought and writings of Leo Strauss, then, is necessarily problematic. This is not an accident. The fact that commentators do not agree about what Strauss himself argued is itself a clue to what is most important in Leo Strauss. The most basic awareness a philosopher must have, according to Strauss, is the recognition of what he calls “the fundamental or permanent problems.” At the very center of his life and thought, Strauss is calling upon us to recognize the deeply problematic character of human existence. It is entirely fitting that Strauss’s thought should be inherently problematic.

But none of this makes the work of providing an introduction to that thought any easier. Strauss has generated dramatically varying interpretations. For his students and other admirers, sometimes called “Straussians,” Leo Strauss is among the most significant scholars or philosophers of the twentieth century – in fact, perhaps the most important. For these, he is a figure who has revived political philosophy and classical thought, rediscovered old and hidden ways of reading, and made the very beginnings of Socratic political philosophy available to us once more. He has diagnosed with unsurpassed clarity the “crisis of our time,” and yet has also recovered the nobility and validity of revelation and renewed the debate between Athens and Jerusalem. In so doing, this Strauss has helped free his readers and students from false and destructive ideological thinking or naive ambitions about the transforming possibilities of politics, and so has recovered political moderation and the need for statesmanlike prudence and restraint in our all-too-dogmatic political world. This Leo Strauss is a wise and sober friend to liberal democracy, and especially to American liberal democracy.

On the other side, Strauss has been greeted by his critics – of whom there are many – as the very opposite of that in almost every respect, often in strangely contrasting ways. On the one hand he has been portrayed as essentially an intellectual fraud, lacking in basic scholarship, or pursuing a scholarship that is perverse beyond the idiosyncratic: more a cult leader than a diligent scholar. Whatever claims he may have to philosophical insight are, from this perspective, entirely overblown: where he is not derivative, he is delusional. At the same time, other critics have portrayed Strauss as not so much an incompetent crank, more a kind of intellectual Moriarty, a spider weaving an insidious and hidden web that seeks to undermine liberal democracy. This Strauss seeks to effect a politics of lying and manipulation informed by the thought of Nietzsche or even by a kind of fascism. In this view, Strauss’s all-too-superior “philosophers” are supposed to rule over all-too-human subjects. For critics in this camp, the role of Strauss’s students in the “American right” (and above all the neo-conservatives who came to power in the White House of George W. Bush) reveals the inner truth of what Strauss has really been about behind the veil of traditional conservatism. For these critics, he is a false friend to liberal democracy, and his influence has been a disaster for American and global political life.

So, for the reader who seeks to be both critical and sympathetic and to find a middle road between the Straussians and the anti-Straussians, this leaves the question: who is Leo Strauss, and in what context are we to understand his writings?

Ironically, one of the challenges in answering this is that, in contrast to many contemporary thinkers, Strauss appears to write simply and straightforwardly. He largely shuns technical language, finding it abstract and unphilosophical – and so, at the level of sentences or even paragraphs, his writing can appear to need no introduction. The last few books he wrote may seem to be nothing more than uninspiring summaries of the texts on which they claim to be commentaries. It is certainly true that, when Strauss wants to, he can write with great clarity and beauty. The challenge in reading him is to keep track of the subtle and continual shifts and changes that come to light as he moves from one thought to the next. Things quickly become complicated as we start trying to put together the various things Strauss says.

Three further things in Strauss’s writing lead to even greater complexity. First, as we have already remarked, at the heart of his thinking Strauss emphasizes the irresolvable, problematic character of existence. This means that tensions and oppositions are themselves essential to Strauss’s thought. Even among his students there is wide disagreement about how Strauss resolves, characterizes, or even formulates these tensions. For example, the contrast or tension between reason and revelation is fundamental to Strauss’s thought, but Strauss’s readers differ in what they see him doing with the reason–revelation “problem.” There are atheistic, secularist Straussians and there are faith-based Straussians: both groups find a ground for their position in Strauss’s writings. Another example of this fundamental disagreement is Strauss’s assessment of the importance of ordinary civic or political morality. Some take Strauss to be a firm defender of such morals; others take the opposite view, that Strauss is in fact contemptuous of ordinary moral understanding. In general, I will not try to resolve these debates, but will suggest a formulation that seems best to cohere with what seem to be Strauss’s other thoughts. Staying with the problems more than any solution was in fact a central characteristic Strauss himself discerned in philosophy, which he saw to be the love or pursuit, rather than the actual possession, of wisdom.

The second major challenge to introducing Strauss’s thought is that the vast majority of his writings consists of commentaries on other writings, mostly works from the history of political thought in the western intellectual tradition (inclusive of the Jewish and Islamic Middle Ages), from the ancient Greeks to the twentieth century. In his commentaries he often assumed the voice of the author of the writing under discussion, or of one of the characters in a dialogue. Strauss only occasionally wrote in his own voice, and never provided a complete or comprehensive account or analysis of his philosophical claims. This, of course, increases the challenge of sorting out what Strauss’s thought is in its own terms. This indirect form of “communication through commentary” is not an accidental feature of Strauss’s thought; it belongs to his core claim about how philosophy arises from opinion, and how philosophy functions in the context of opinion.

The third great issue for the reader of Strauss is that Strauss claimed as one of his most important discoveries a tradition of “esoteric” writing in the western philosophical tradition, from the ancient Greeks through to the eighteenth century. He argued that many philosophers hid their teaching under an “exoteric” or outer form. This raises the obvious question: does Strauss himself also practice this art? We will discuss Strauss’s understanding of exoteric/esoteric teachings at length in chapter 3 – but at this point, it is important at least to recognize the complication it presents. In claiming to understand Strauss, the reader must acknowledge that Strauss himself might have – or perhaps should be presumed to have – a secret or “esoteric” teaching. This obviously disrupts the normal assumption that authors mean what they say, and so complicates the task of discerning what Strauss might mean.

These challenges to understanding and explaining Strauss’s thought have convinced me that a somewhat unusual approach is needed for a book such as this one that is trying to introduce Strauss’s thought in a balanced way, both sympathetically and critically. Because there is so much controversy about what Strauss’s position is, I have chosen to quote from him much more than is normal in an introductory book. Also, because his published writing is often complex and circuitous, I have made much use of his letters, unpublished writings, and lectures, where he is often clearer and more direct about his views. The huge advantage such an approach affords is that Strauss is a very good writer. His sentences are usually clear and, when he wants to, he can be wonderfully evocative and compelling. We will be trying to use Strauss to help us understand Strauss.

So while things can get complicated in trying to get at what Strauss’s thought consists in, and there is a large and vexed secondary literature, we will seek to find our way to the center of his thought by focusing upon the question that was for him at the center of human existence: what is the best or right life? Strauss’s work was a continuous response to this question.

The first thing is to provide an outline of Strauss’s life, and then to describe briefly some of the basic themes and claims of his thought as it seeks to think the question of the best life.