SOURCE: Smith, Gregory Bruce. “Who Was Leo Strauss?” American Scholar 66, no. 1 (winter 1997): 95-104.

In the following essay, Smith examines the critical controversy surrounding Strauss's philosophy and reputation.

More than twenty years after his death, Leo Strauss remains an enigmatic and controversial figure. Commentators, both friendly and hostile, have variously found the pivot point of Strauss's thought in a desired return to Greek thought—in some permutations complete with the elitism of the rule of philosopher-kings; or in a conservative defense of modern, liberal democracy, especially against Marxist communism; or in a furtive, esoteric, historicist, Nietzschean nihilism hidden behind a clever, rhetorical public teaching on the one hand, or in a dogmatic, hierarchical, inegalitarian understanding of unchanging Nature on the other; in the reflections of a fundamentally Jewish thinker, or in a Socratic skepticism; and on and on.

Since his death Strauss has even been attacked in the popular...