Description
Book SynopsisHannah Arendt and Leo Strauss were two of the twentieth century's most influential and compelling political philosophers. Liisi Keedus explores how their shared background in Weimar Germany shaped their intellectual preoccupations, unravelling striking similarities, and genuine antagonisms, between the two thinkers.
Trade Review'This insightful and well-researched book reads like a thriller. True to its title, the book covers the responses of Arendt and Strauss to the German historical school and to the historicized philosophy of the Weimar years. It also deals with the situation that Arendt and Strauss faced as Jews in Germany during those years. But the book is not limited to these topics nor is it limited to the early years of Arendt and Strauss … Highly recommended. General readers, upper-division undergraduate students, and above.' Choice
'There is much from which one can learn in this book. Keedus has read broadly in the intellectual and political debates in Germany in the early twentieth century. Learning about the contemporary cultural impact of a Friedrich Gogarten or a Karl Barth is interesting in its own right, and the sense of cultural crisis associated with such thinkers is relevant to the political philosophies later articulated by Arendt and Strauss … Keedus's book offers the paradox of a historicist treatment of thinkers who (as her own argument highlights) rebelled against historicism.' Ronald Beiner, The Review of Politics
'I believe the great merit of the book consists in broadening the scope of themes and authors to which and whom Strauss and Arendt have related and in introducing much new source material.' Wout Cornelissen, History of Political Thought
Table of ContentsIntroduction; 1. The untimely generation; 2. The problem of politics in Arendt's and Strauss' early writings; 3. History and political understanding: an ambivalent symbiosis; 4. Liberalism and modernity: rethinking the question of the 'proud'; 5. Retrieving the problem of theoria and praxis: the antagonisms; Epilogue; Bibliography; Index.
