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Jerusalem and Athens: Reason and Revelation in the Works of Leo Strauss. By Susan Orr. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995. 224p. $65.50 cloth, $22.95 paper.
Michael Palmer, University of Maine
Susan Orr's book is one of a relatively small but rapidly increasing number of attempts to read and understand the writings of Leo Strauss as Strauss read and understood the writings of political philosophers before him. The first genuinely philosophical reading of Strauss was Alexandre Kojeve's, half a century ago in postwar Paris. The most recent commendable attempt is Laurence Lampert's (1966) Leo Strauss and Nietzsche.
Orr's book is a paragraph-by-paragraph, even sentence-by-sentence, commentary on Strauss's 1967 lecture "Jerusalem and Athens: Some Preliminary Reflections." Orr says in her introductory chapter that she has limited herself to only one essay because the subject of reason and revelation in Strauss's thought is so complex that a discussion of it in all of his works "could lead us to incorrect assumptions" (p. 18). How a discussion of the theme in all of Strauss's works, as opposed to just one, might lead to incorrect assumptions is not specified. Orr nevertheless insists upon the importance and makes liberal use of five other works of Strauss: "Progress or Return? The Contemporary Crisis in Western Civilization" (1981) and "The Mutual Influence of Theology and Philosophy" (1979), both from lectures delivered in 1952; "On the Interpretation of Genesis" (1981), a lecture from 1957; the "Introductory Essay" Strauss wrote for the English translation of his Spinoza's Critique of Religion (1965); and Natural Right and History (1953). She refers to other writings, too. Orr's protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, then, we believe that she presents what is, to the best of her ability, a comprehensive interpretation of reason and revelation in the thought of Leo Strauss. Mimicking Orr mimicking Strauss, we might suggest that this is the esoteric intention behind the fact that the cover page...