Leo Strauss and the Challenge of Revealed Religion

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Notes

1. Strauss, “Progress or Return?” 128.

2. Strauss, “Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion,” 172.

3. Leo Strauss, City and Man, 13. See also Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, 22–37.

4. See Havers, “Strauss and the Politics of Biblical Religion,” for an explanation of Strauss’s reasoning here. See also Havers, Strauss and Anglo-American Democracy (65–97), for a critique of Strauss’s hermeneutic.

5. Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 172–73. See also Strauss, What is Political Philosophy? 45.

6. Cf. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 23: “Far from legitimizing the historicist reference, history seems rather to prove that all human thought, and certainly all philosophic thought, is concerned with the same fundamental themes or the same fundamental problems, and therefore that there exists an unchanging framework which persists in all changes of human knowledge of both facts and principles.” But see also Rosen, Hermeneutics as Politics, 128: “He [Strauss] needs to show that political motives, typical patterns of behavior, or, in sum, the ‘fundamental’ political problems are the same in all times [known to us].”

7. Strauss, “Progress or Return?” 104.

8. See Polka, Between Philosophy and Religion, 78–102.

9. Strauss, “Progress or Return?” 124.

10. Strauss, “Jerusalem and Athens,” 396.

11. Polka, Between Philosophy and Religion, 143–287.

12. Cf. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 120: “there are also usurpatory concepts, such as fortune, fate, which, though allowed to circulate by almost universal indulgence, are yet from time to time challenged by the question: quid juris.” (B117; author’s italics).

13. See Viroli, Machiavelli’s God, 49–50.

14. Nietzsche, “Genealogy of Morals,” 167 (I, 7).

15. Rousseau, “The Geneva Manuscript,” 158.