SOURCE: Smith, Steven B. “Destruktion or Recovery?: Leo Strauss's Critique of Heidegger.” Review of Metaphysics 51, no. 2 (December 1997): 345-77.

In the following essay, Smith evaluates Strauss's treatment of and relationship to the German philosopher Martin Heidegger.

Of the numerous legacies bequeathed by Leo Strauss, his influence on the study of German philosophy frequently goes least mentioned. Apart from some early reviews and other occasional pieces, Strauss left no major work on any German thinker.¹ With the exception of the chapter on Max Weber in Natural Right and History and a short essay on Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil written near the end of his life, there are no works on such giants of the German Aufklärung as Mendelssohn, Kant, and Hegel to rival his studies of other seminal figures in the history of political thought.² Why, for example, did Strauss not write a Thoughts on Kant to parallel...