Bret Stephens on Leo Strauss

Bret Stephens of the Jerusalem Post is one of our favorite columnist. By coincidence (or is it?) he turns out to be a an admirer of Leo Strauss, the putative patron saint of the neoconservatives who supposedly run the United States these days. Stephens finds little resemblance between the Strauss he read as a student at the University of Chicago and the Strauss portrayed by liberals out to attack Paul Wolfowitz. As Stephens explains, “There is no such thing as ‘Straussianism’: not as an ideology, much less as some kind of conspiracy. There was merely a man named Leo Strauss, a Jew, a Zionist, a classicist, a man who engaged profoundly and forcefully with the greatest issues of his day who taught his students that ‘we cannot be philosophers but we can love philosophy’, chiefly by ‘listening to the conversations between the greatest philosophers’. . . .And having spent three decades in the grave, the least Strauss deserves is to be read before he is condmened.”

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