The New School for Social Research presents “New Perspectives on Leo Strauss from America and Europe,” a unique conference that brings together leading intellectuals and scholars from across the political spectrum to offer fresh thoughts about the work and legacy of Leo Strauss, one of the most influential political philosophers of the twentieth century. Between 1938 and 1948, Strauss taught at The New School for Social Research, where, according to Mark Lilla, one of his premiere exponents, “he spent ten obscure but intellectually productive years.” During that time, Strauss wrote On Tyranny and Persecution and the Art of Writing. It was later, while teaching at the University of Chicago, where Strauss remained from 1949 through the late 1960s, that he penned Natural Right and Historyand The City and Man. His famed group of followers, known as the “Straussians,” emerged in earnest in Chicago.
In recent years, some of those followers have been the subject of intense debate in the high-brow and mainstream press. More than a few have held prominent positions in Washington, leading pundits and critics to treat the neoconservative movement as a Straussian phenomenon. Peter Berkowitz has tried to set the record straight. Writing in the Weekly Standard in June 2003, he dismissed as “wildly implausible” the scenario that neoconservative intellectuals “craftily ascended to positions of power in the federal government” only “to implement Strauss’s teachings.” Just as implausible, Berkowitz argued, was the imputation of “almost superhuman powers” to Strauss, as if the dead philosophy professor commanded the actions of “highly successful and well-placed individuals not only in politics but in the media and the academy.”
Yet Strauss’s decisive influence on political thought during and after the Cold War remains to be understood fully. That is what Mark Lilla, Peter Berkowitz, William Kristol, James Miller, and other conference participants will explore November 18 on the Second Floor of 55 West 13th Street from 9:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. They will resituate Leo Strauss’s work within the history of political ideas and discuss his relationship to Christianity, America, Germany, and liberal democracy, among other things.