Leo Strauss and the Iraq War

By Scott Horton

It’s a commonplace among political philosophy students to note that the Neocons may be Straussians, but that hardly makes Leo Strauss a Neocon. After all, he died in 1973, and his daughter insists that he voted for Adlai Stevenson and had liberal leanings before his notoriously negative reaction to the student movement of the late sixties. But Alan Gilbert argues that Leo Strauss’s politics are very close to those of the recent generation of politically active Neocons. He traces the idea of a great anti-modern tyrant in the writings of Strauss, drawing on his discussion of Machiavelli, Xenophon, Plato, and his contemporary Alexandre Kojève. But the most interesting nuggets in Gilbert’s paper relate to Strauss’s direct engagement in the political world.