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Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue. By Heinrich Meier. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. 136p. $19.95.
Shadia B. Drury, University of Calgary
This book is a useful contribution to the current controversy over the fascinating and frustrating work of Carl Schmitt. The thesis of the book is that no one understood Schmitt better than Leo Strauss and that this fact was acknowledged (in private) by Schmitt himself. To prove his thesis, Meier provides us with a detailed commentary on the three editions of Schmitt's most famous work, The Concept of the Political. Even though Schmitt maintained that the changes in the later editions were not of a substantial nature, Meier sets out to show that the changes are in fact significant and that they are a direct response to the comments and criticisms of Leo Strauss.
Meier's book includes the complete text of Strauss's well-known commentary on Schmitt's book (in a new translation) as well as three letters written by Strauss to Schmitt. But there are no letters from Schmitt to Strauss; Meier suggests that Schmitt never responded to Strauss's letters or acknowledged his influence because it was difficult for a member of the Nazi Party and one of its leading lights to acknowledge the influence of a young Jewish scholar in 1933.
Meier's book is not a good introduction to either Carl Schmitt or Leo Strauss; it is of value only to those who already know something about these authors. To appreciate the book, it is useful to know something about the recent efforts to rehabilitate Schmitt's work. From this viewpoint, Schmitt's membership in the Nazi Party was an opportunistic ploy that was not logically or theoretically linked to his political thought, which is a brilliant and incisive critique of liberalism. In...