Leo Strauss: Man of Peace
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Description
Leo Strauss is known to many people as a thinker of the right, who inspired hawkish views on national security and perhaps even advocated war without limits. Moving beyond gossip and innuendo about Strauss's followers and the Bush administration, this book provides the first comprehensive analysis of Strauss's writings on political violence, considering also what he taught in the classroom on this subject. In stark contrast to popular perception, Strauss emerges as a man of peace, favorably disposed to international law and skeptical of imperialism – a critic of radical ideologies (right and left) who warns of the dangers to free thought and civil society when philosophers and intellectuals ally themselves with movements that advocate violence. Robert Howse provides new readings of Strauss's confrontation with fascist/Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, his debate with Alexandre Kojève about philosophy and tyranny, and his works on Machiavelli and Thucydides and examines Strauss's lectures on Kant's Perpetual Peace and Grotius's Rights of War and Peace. First book on Leo Strauss to extensively consider his lectures and seminars in addition to his published works. The only non-polemical book-length treatment of Strauss's controversial statements about war, imperialism, justice and power in international relations, taking a point of view that is neither Straussian nor anti-Straussian. Explains the complexity of Strauss's ideas through a unique interpretation of his own intellectual and spiritual journey, beginning from the awkward position of an intellectually conservative Jew in the Weimar Republic.
Publication Date
2014
Recommended Citation
Howse, Robert L., "Leo Strauss: Man of Peace" (2014). Faculty Books & Edited Works. 404.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-books-edited-works/404
