SOURCE: Wilhelmsen, Frederick D. “Classical Political Theory and the Western Mind.” Commonweal 73, no. 6 (4 November 1960): 152, 154.

In the following positive review of What Is Political Philosophy?, Wilhelmsen describes Strauss's interest in classical political philosophy and its place in the modern world.

The very suggestion of a restoration within political philosophy must seem archaic, if not downright perverse, to the bulk of those academicians who practice the discipline of politics within the American academy today. I say that the suggestion must seem archaic because historicism, a first principle of most contemporary political theory, precludes the very possibility of any kind of restoration within political theory: a restoration would imply that political meaning does not take its departure from, and is not identified with, the historical moment in which that meaning is born and within which it must play out whatever role it has within human history. This last, of course, is...