8 - The Modern World of Leo Strauss

Summary

There are a number of very well-known controversies associated with Leo Strauss. However, although arguable, it seems fair enough to claim that it is his complex and multifront attack on the insufficiencies of modernity that stands as his most influential legacy in America, both inside and outside the academy. This probably has something to do with the unique importance of the ideas of Enlightenment, religious tolerance, and scientific optimism in American political life, when compared to the more homogeneous societies of Western Europe. The very possibility and fate of an American nation state are tied deeply to the possibility and fate of Enlightenment modernity, and so Strauss's reflections were bound to find a distinct (and distinctly contentious) audience in the United States.

Moreover, the problem of Strauss's reception has become even more fascinating and confusing in the contemporary American academy. His attacks on the self-satisfaction of post-Enlightenment culture, his doubts about the benefits of technological mastery, about the attempted avoidance of any public reliance on religion, and about the modern confidence in the power of enlightened self-interest in the formation of a polity, all often delivered in a rhetoric sometimes bordering on biblical prophecy, have now suddenly reappeared, more quietly but insistently, on the agendas of neo- Aristotelians, critical theorists, communitarians, and postmodernists.