Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America [Hardcover]

Offers a strikingly original interpretation of Leo Strauss, his 'political philosophy', and the connection of both to the American conservative movement.This book offers a strikingly original interpretation of Leo Strauss, his political philosophy, and the connection of both to the American conservative movement. There is nothing essentially conservative about what Strauss or his leading disciples have taught about politics or morals. Their reading of texts does not prefer antiquity to modernity. Strauss and his most prominent students offer a very contemporary-looking reading of pre-modern texts. They have also bequeathed to the current Right a combination of welfare state democracy and liberal internationalism as a foreign policy.This book offers a strikingly original interpretation of Leo Strauss, his political philosophy, and the connection of both to the American conservative movement. There is nothing essentially conservative about what Strauss or his leading disciples have taught about politics or morals. Their reading of texts does not prefer antiquity to modernity. Strauss and his most prominent students offer a very contemporary-looking reading of pre-modern texts. They have also bequeathed to the current Right a combination of welfare state democracy and liberal internationalism as a foreign policy.This book offers an original interpretation of the achievement of Leo Strauss, stressing how his ideas and followers reshaped the American conservative movement. According to this study, Strauss and his disciples came to influence the establishment Right almost by accident. The conservative movement that reached out to Strauss and his legacy was extremely fluid and lacked a self-confident leadership. Conservative activists and journalists felt a desperate need for academic acceptability, which they thought Strauss and his disciples would furnish. They also became deeply concerned with the problem of value relativism, which self-described conservativeslcc