The German Stranger Leo Strauss and National Socialism [Paperback]

Philosophically trained and philologically inclined, Altman marshals stupendous erudition and dazzling wit in the service of what is both a necessary and a preliminary task in the pursuit of a recovery of the Platonic and biblical foundations of western humanity. Humanity is the cause for the sake of which this book was written.No other critic of Leo Strauss has provided such an erudite, meticulous, imaginative, and eloquent study of his writings. Friend or foe, anyone who wants to participate intelligently in the Strauss Wars will need to scrutinize and confront this extraordinary book.Altman's important, richly detailed study of Strauss' life and work is likely to change many views of who he was and what he stood for, above all as concerns his complex relations with such pro-Nazi German intellectuals as Heidegger and Schmitt.The German Stranger is a fascinating read. Altman takes up an extraordinarily difficult subjectLeo Strauss's relationship to German National Socialismand handles it with genuine grace and insight. Unafraid to raise troubling and uncomfortable questions regarding Strauss's exoteric style of writing and its relationship to politics, Altman succeeds in providing an excellent analysis of Strauss's relation to the Western philosophical tradition as an exercise in political analysis. By looking critically at Strauss's early philosophical development as a student of Heidegger and considering his relationship to important Jewish thinkers such as Karl L?with, Gershom Scholem, Franz Rosenzweig, and others, Altman manages to present a convincing portrait of Strauss as a thinker with deep sympathies for a National Socialist worldview. As paradoxical and shocking as this might sound, Altman manages to show how Strauss's thought was deeply influenced by National Socialist ideas and how he was able to suppress such sympathies when he later arrived in the United States. For anyone interested in deconstructing the portrait of Strauss as the spiritual foreflc#