Reviews for Leo Strauss's thought

The average rating for Leo Strauss's thought based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-03-29 00:00:00 Garrett Stauffer Let me start by saying that I'm not fond of Leo Strauss, nor of his disciples. Allan Bloom in particular comes to mind. Additionally, a book like this (i.e., an account of Strauss's influence on and relationship to American neoconservatism) is well overdue. I say a book like this because Drury's book is truly subpar. The standards of scholarship here leave much to be desired. Quotations are rare and short, while Drury's assertions are expansive and frequent. Apparently, for Drury, Adorno, Heidegger, and Strauss all occupy the same intellectual and philosophical terrain. Her comprehension of Marx is laughably bad. Weasel words infest the text. While some of her conclusions (that the aforementioned influence or relationship even exists, for example) are more than plausible, the manner in which she argues to those conclusions does her aim great disservice. In summary, if you want a short, extremely polemical text about Strauss, this may suit your needs. If, on the other hand, you want a competent scholarly work, you'd be well-advised to look elsewhere.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-01-06 00:00:00 Jessica Nelson I don't know why I bothered finishing this book. It was short, I guess, and it did have some interesting bits that I did not know about or much about such as Carl Schmitt's influence on Strauß. But the basic gist of the book is that Strauß and his fawning epigones in the religious right think that some kind of religious orthodoxy is necessary to keep the masses in check while the true philosophical elites, that being the Straussian inner circle, are all closet nihilists who know that morality is for chumps. I already knew that. In fact, it has now become a cliché that the religious right is the party of glaring moral hypocrisy. Larry Craig, anyone?