Description
Book SynopsisLeo Strauss has perhaps been more citedand alternately vilified or reveredin the last ten years than during the productive years of his scholarly life. He has been blamed (or credited) for providing the intellectual underpinnings of a generation of neoconservatives in political philosophy and foreign policy. But though he may be cast as a conservative thinker who critiques modernity, to interpret him exclusively in this light is to reduce him in ways that his self-definition, as a political theorist open to both religion and philosophy, does not justify.
Kim A. Sorensen clearly lays out the debate surrounding Strauss by reviewing his published work and legacy since his death in 1973. He then turns to a key distinction in Strauss''s thoughtbetween revelation and reason, or religion and philosophyand maintains that Strauss used their mutual opposition to modernity as a central theme in his oeuvre. For Sorensen, Strauss considered revelation and reason both as fundamentally diffe
Trade Review
"Sorensen chooses Strauss's dense and difficult book Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958) as his meeting point with the whole problem of revelation and reason as it was understood by the German philosopher." —Perspectives on Political Science
“In a short but dense work, Sorensen provides an excellent analysis of Leo Strauss's Thoughts on Machiavelli, and in the process provides insight into both Machiavelli and Strauss . . . . This is a substantial contribution to the literature on Strauss.” —Choice
"This is an excellent work that will lay just claim to being a major treatment of the most significant themes in the work of Leo Strauss. Sorensen's persuasive and original linking of Strauss's critical study of Machiavelli with Strauss on reason/revelation illuminates a new dimension of the philosopher's thought." —Walter Nicgorski, University of Notre Dame
