SOURCE: Himmelfarb, Milton. “On Leo Strauss.” Commentary 58, no. 2 (August 1974): 60-6.

In the following essay, Himmelfarb offers a retrospective of Strauss's career as a political theorist and Jewish scholar.

Leo Strauss died in October 1973, at the age of seventy-four. His name is known chiefly to two groups of scholars whose interests do not normally converge, political scientists and specialists in medieval Jewish thought. For political scientists he was the man who challenged what “everyone” knew was the first requirement of science—that it should be, in Max Weber's language, wertfrei, value-free. A scientist—an astrophysicist, say—does not ask whether the things or processes or relationships he studies are good or bad, noble or base, desirable or undesirable. A social scientist is a scientist. He has a choice: on the one hand, objectivity, freedom from or neutrality about values, science; on the other, subjectivity, value preferences, not science. When...