Recovering Hegel From The Critique Of Leo Strauss

Recovering Hegel from the Critique of Leo Srauss offers a defense of modernity against the critique of the influential mid-twentieth century political philosopher, Leo Strauss. Strauss, whose influence on contemporary conservative political theory is well documented, discovered the ground of much of what he found wanting in contemporary political and social life to lie in the philosophy of the 19th century German philosopher, G. W. F. Hegel. Specifically, Strauss accused Hegel of being the greatest exponent of historicism and thus the relativism that afflicts modern thought. Ultimately, according to Strauss, this has led to the nihilism and general mediocrity that characterizes modern western culture. In this book, Sara MacDonald and Barry Craig examine Strauss’s reading of Hegel and argue that in fact it is a mis-reading. Contrary to Strauss’s interpretation, this book holds that Hegel was no relativist and in fact sought to show the compatibility of objective, eternal truth with modern human subjectivity. At the same time, it illustrates the way in which Hegel’s thought prepared the ground for enlightened modern liberal democracies and also remains relevant to current social and political conversations.

In the winter of 1965, Leo Strauss taught a seminar on Hegel at the University of Chicago. While Strauss neither considered himself a Hegelian nor wrote about Hegel at any length, his writings contain intriguing references to the philosopher, particularly in connection with his studies of Hobbes, in his debate in On Tyranny with Alexandre Kojève; and in his account of the “three waves” of modern political philosophy. Leo Strauss on Hegel reconstructs Strauss’s seminar on Hegel, supplemented by passages from an earlier version of the seminar from which only fragments of a transcript remain. Strauss focused his seminar on the lectures collected in The Philosophy of History, which he considered more accessible than Hegel’s written works. In his own lectures on Hegel, Strauss continues his project of demonstrating how modern philosophers related to ancient thought and explores the development and weaknesses of modern political theory. Strauss is especially concerned with the relationship in Hegel between empirical history and his philosophy of history, and he argues for the primacy of religion in Hegel’s understanding of history and society. In addition to a relatively complete transcript, Leo Strauss on Hegel also includes annotations, which bring context and clarity to the text.

This is the first book-length examination of the impact Leo Strauss’ immigration to the United States had on this thinking. Adi Armon weaves together a close reading of unpublished seminars Strauss taught at the University of Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s with an interpretation of his later works, all of which were of course written against the backdrop of the Cold War. First, the book describes the intellectual environment that shaped the young Strauss’ worldview in the Weimar Republic, tracing those aspects of his thought that changed and others that remained consistent up until his immigration to America. Armon then goes on to explore the centrality of Karl Marx to Strauss’s intellectual biography. By analyzing an unpublished seminar Strauss taught with Joseph Cropsey at the University of Chicago in 1960, Armon shows how Strauss’ fragmentary, partial engagement with Marx in writing obscured the important role that Marxism actually played as an intellectual challenge to his later political thinking. Finally, the book explores the manifestations of Straussian doctrine in postwar America through reading Strauss’ The City and Man (1964) as a representative of his political teaching.

This book studies several of Mark Helprin’s novels in terms of their relation to Dante’s Divine Comedy. The authors demonstrate that A Soldier of the Great War, In Sunlight and in Shadow, and Winter’s Tale substantially correspond to, respectively, Dante’s Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. The author himself has acknowledged his debt to Dante and references to the Comedy appear throughout his works. It is not that Helprin’s novels track their Dantean antecedents slavishly, or even follow the structure of the Canticles explicitly. Rather, the central arguments of Dante’s three works are taken up by Helprin in his novels. In adopting Dante’s essentially Platonic doctrine of mediation, Helprin’s characters are fully instantiated human beings who also mediate and reveal the divine. In his engagement with Dante, Helprin affirms the core philosophical, theological and psychological arguments of the Comedy, and then modifies those arguments in a distinctly modern way. Specifically, Helprin focuses on human freedom as the necessary precondition for justice to exist, both for individuals and for societies. In the final chapter of the book, the authors turn to Helprin’s Freddy and Fredericka. In this novel, Helprin both assumes Dante’s argument, and then radically alters it, by pointing to the possibility of a just regime on earth, rather than one that exists merely in heaven. While accepting much of Dante’s metaphysical argument, Helprin shows the virtues of liberal democracy as that form of political regime that is most able to unite human eros with eternal principles. In the end, Helprin’s novels are remarkable for the way in which they advocate for ancient virtues, while insisting upon the distinctly modern liberal account of human freedom as the necessary foundation for human flourishing.

Both critically and commercially successful filmmakers, the Coen brothers have written, produced, and directed numerous acclaimed films over the past three decades. Sara MacDonald and Barry Craig demonstrate that their comedies, in particular, which are often dismissed as mere entertainments, actually present substantial philosophic and political arguments. They examine five of the Coen brothers’ comedies: Raising Arizona, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou, and Hail Caesar!. In those works, they discover insightful engagements with such ideas as questions of human freedom, the relationship of reason to religion, and the nature of liberal democracy in the American regime. They demonstrate how sometimes explicitly, but generally implicitly, the Coens draw on thinkers such as Homer, Plato, Dante, and Hegel, while simultaneously presenting popular entertainment.

This book explores the understanding of freedom developed in the later novels of celebrated Canadian author, David Adams Richards. Many reviewers highlight two interconnected features in Richards novels: a seemingly rigid determinism of setting and sociodemographics, and a resulting hopelessness. In contrast, Richards describes the quest of human life and the purpose of his novels as a search for freedom. This book explores the account of freedom that is developed through the course of four of Richards’s works: The Friends of Meager Fortune, Mercy Among the Children, The Lost Highway, and Crimes Against My Brother. Following the Augustinian thread that informs Richards’s writing, we argue that rather than presenting an understanding of human life that is bleak or hopeless, Richards instead reveals an argument wherein one’s happiness and freedom is found in the midst of love.

This book compares the thought of Michael Oakeshott and Leo Strauss, bringing Oakeshott’s desire for a renaissance of poetic individuality into dialogue with Strauss’s recovery of the universality of philosophical enlightenment. Starting from the conventional understanding of these thinkers as important voices of twentieth-century conservatism, McIlwain traces their deeper and more radical commitments to the highpoints of human achievement and their shared concerns with the fate of traditional inheritances in modernity, the role and meaning of history, the intention and meaning of political philosophy, and the problem of politics and religion. The book culminates in an articulation of the positions of Oakeshott and Strauss as part of the quarrel of poetry and philosophy, revealing the ongoing implications of their thinking in terms of the profound spiritual and political questions raised by modern thinkers such as Hobbes, Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger and leading back to foundational figures of Western civilization including St. Augustine and Socrates.

For seven seasons, AMC’s Mad Men captivated audiences with the story of Don Draper, an advertising executive whose personal and professional successes and failures took viewers on a roller coaster ride through America’s tumultuous 1960s. More than just a television show about one of advertising’s “bad boys,” the series investigates the principles of the American regime, exploring whether or not the American Dream is a sustainable vision of human flourishing and happiness. This collection of essays investigates the show’s engagement with the philosophic and political foundations of American democracy.

On Tyranny remains a perennial favorite, possessing a timelessness that few philosophical or scholarly debates have ever achieved. On one hand, On Tyranny is the first book-length work in Leo Strauss's extended study of Xenophon, and his "Restatement" retains a vivacity and directness that is sometimes absent in his later works. On the other, "Tyranny and Wisdom" is perhaps the most succinct yet fullest articulation of Alexandre Kojève's overall political thought, and it presents what may be the most uncompromising alternative to Strauss's position as a whole. This volume contains for the first time a comprehensive and critical examination of the debate from scholars well versed in the thought of Strauss, Kojève, Hegel, Heidegger, and the end of history thesis. Of particular interest will be the appendix, which offers for the first time Kojève's unabridged response to Strauss, a response previously available only from the Fonds Kojève at Le Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Accessible to students and scholars alike, this volume works equally well in the classroom and as a resource for more advanced research.