Editors’ Introduction

Abstract

As a young scholar in 1920s Germany, Leo Strauss, under Ernst Cassirer, earned his doctorate with a dissertation on F. H. Jacobi, went on to study with Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, worked on a series of studies on primarily Jewish themes while employed at the Academy for the Scientific Study of Judaism in Berlin, and, as he soon afterward said about his intellectual outlook during his twenties, was “so dominated and bewitched” by the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche “that I literally believed everything that I understood of him.”¹ What this perhaps hyperbolic remark seems to have meant is that Strauss was convinced by Nietzsche that “God is dead”—namely that not only the Biblical God but also the high claims of rationalism (Plato’s Ideas, Aristotle’s teloi, the modern scientific reconstruction of human life) had all been shown to have lost their power to convince or compel the modern (or nascent postmodern) soul to assent to their putative truths. Indeed, Truth itself (as a plausible concept) would seem to have breathed its last. And while the charm of Plato continued to hold sway over the young Strauss—he remarked in a reminiscence late in life that he would once have loved nothing less than to have been a rural postmaster who spent his free time raising rabbits and studying the Platonic dialogues²—he could only have done so in the somewhat impotent manner of the amused end-of-history thinker looking to fill his days (or, as a hostile critic would later say, “rolling the classics round the tongue like old brandy”³), for he remained convinced that a “return to the classics was not possible.”