Leo’s Web

In recent years, particularly after the United States invasion of Iraq in 2003, there has been a flourishing cottage industry in portraying political philosopher Leo Strauss as the godfather of a nefarious and multigenerational neoconser­vative conspiracy to promote the rule of strife and unreason. As an undergraduate, I first discovered this German political philosopher through a 2004 BBC documentary by filmmaker Adam Curtis entitled The Power of Nightmares, which purported to show the parallels between Strauss and the modern theorists of Islamist terrorism. Robert Howse, a professor of international law at New York University, has produced a new book, Leo Strauss: Man of Peace, which dispels the conspiracy theories while at the same time promoting a critical engagement with Strauss’s work. Through careful studies of his writings on Machiavelli and Thucydides and his exchanges with two prominent political theorists, Howse demonstrates that Strauss was not a...