11 - The Complementarity of Political Philosophy and Liberal Education in the Thought of Leo Strauss

Summary

Leo Strauss established himself among the leading students of Western political thought in the second half of the twentieth century and a renowned teacher of future teachers of that subject. He taught but also thought carefully about teaching. In his maturity, he was a professor in a number of American universities (New School, University of Chicago, with which he is most famously identified, Claremont Men's College and St. John's College in Annapolis) and one who reflected on liberal education in a liberal democracy. At the same time, Strauss was an inheritor of classical German education as it existed in the early twentieth century. In this capacity, he contributed two important essays explicitly devoted to the problem of liberal education, although his work as a whole can be seen as an ongoing and open-ended set of reflections on the broader problem of education and democracy.