German-Jewish political philosopher who escaped Nazi Germany, settled at the University of Chicago in 1949, and trained a generation of students — Allan Bloom, Harvey Mansfield, Harry Jaffa, and others — who carried his approach into postwar American conservatism. "Straussianism" is now a recognized, and disputed, school.
Strauss's project was to take classical political philosophy — Plato, Aristotle, Maimonides, Alfarabi — seriously on its own terms, against what he saw as modernity's self-congratulatory dismissal of the ancients. Modernity, in his reading, had been launched by Machiavelli and Hobbes in a deliberate turn away from the classical question of the best regime toward a lower but more "realistic" foundation in self-preservation and self-interest. Each successive wave of modern thought — culminating in Friedrich Nietzsche and Heidegger — had deepened the nihilistic consequences of that turn. The "crisis of our time" was the resulting inability to give a reasoned defense of any way of life as better than another.
His most controversial method was the doctrine of esoteric writing: persecuted philosophers, he argued, often wrote on two levels — an exoteric surface conforming to orthodoxy, an esoteric teaching accessible only to careful readers. The claim invites endless debate over whether Strauss himself wrote esoterically and what he really thought. His political legacy is equally contested: some students became Cold War liberals of a stern kind, others hawkish neoconservatives whose influence in the 2000s Iraq War drew Strauss (probably unfairly) into popular controversy.