December 12, 2003

A Brush With Leo Strauss

By LAURIE FENDRICH

The popular press has lately discovered Leo Strauss (1899-1973), a political philosopher relatively unknown outside the academic world. Strauss's critique of liberal democracy turns out to have greatly influenced not only a number of conservative scholars in political philosophy, but also many powerful figures in the resurgent conservative media (William Kristol, for example) and the current Bush administration (most conspicuously, Paul Wolfowitz). How odd, then, that Strauss, the alleged

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