Cloaked in Virtue: Unveiling Leo Strauss and the Rhetoric of American Foreign Policy [Paperback]

It is now commonly acknowledged that numerous key players in and around the Bush administrations planning of the Iraq invasion were connected through a common background in the political philosophy of Leo Strauss, a German-born University of Chicago professor who died in 1973. These Straussian neocons were held responsible for exploiting the September 11th attacks in order to further their own foreign policy agenda. Cloaked in Virtue is the first book to take a critical view of the political ideas of Leo Strauss himself by careful attention to his own writings before and after his emigration to the United States. The result is a critical examination of the political theory of Leo Strauss, lifting the veil of intentional obfuscation, and its influence on the neoconservative foreign policy of the George W. Bush administration.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of politics and international relations.

1. The Straussian Network  2. Becoming Leo Strauss (I)  3. Becoming Leo Strauss (II)  4. Leo Strauss Comes to America: Politics Between the Lines  5. On Modernity's Tyranny  6. Nihilism and the Straussian Justification of Imperial Power

Xenos dissects the political ideas of Leo Strauss by careful attention to his full body of work. The result is a critical examination of Strausss political theory and its influence on the neoconservative foreign policy of the Bush administration.

Nicholas Xenos is Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

'Cloaked in Virtue offers a political analysis of Leo Strauss and his network of acolytes thatfor oncedoesn't mince words. Its careful and erudite critique of Strauss' writings, their paralytic influence onlÓÞ