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Introduction
Few thinkers of the 20th century have had so controversial an impact on America's intellectual and political landscape as Leo Strauss. Indeed, according to the historian of Jewish America Murray Friedman, Strauss is the one political philosopher who had the greatest influence on the development of Jewish conservatism and the broader conservative movement in the United States since the end of the Second World War (2005, p. 40). As a thinker, Strauss left behind a radical critique of modern liberalism that raises unsettling questions about the prospects and even desirability of the enlightened ideals so closely tied to the fate of the American nation-state and the liberal world order instituted by the United States and its allies in 1945. Revolving around the tensions and dynamics between politics, philosophy and religious faith, his analysis of the shortcomings of liberalism and modernity appears timelier now than ever.
Yet, over past 15 years or so it is not Strauss's legacy as a thinker that has received the most attention, but his legacy as an educator. During his time as a teacher at the New School for Social Research (1938-1949), the University of Chicago (1949-1968) and St-John's College in Annapolis (1969-1972), Strauss earned himself a large following of dedicated students, many of whom went on to become teachers themselves in North American universities and contributed to the development of a 'Straussian' school in political science, which is now at least three generations old. In more recent years, a significant number of so-called Straussians have preferred Washington's corridors of power to those of the university and went on to serve in high-ranking positions in Republican administrations (although a few have served with the Democrats) whereas others have become key players in the network of conservative and neo-conservative think thanks and media organizations, which is in great part responsible for the political success and influence of the Right in America since the early 1980s (Devigne, 1994; Deutsch and Murley, 1999; Lilla, 2004).
Although Strauss had relatively little to say about America and the realm of international relations as such, the growth of Straussianism as a school of political thought and its link to the neo-conservative movement and the Republican Party has led to a wide range of contentious claims about...