Although Leo Strauss's work was highly controversial within the academic disciplines of political science and political philosophy, he remained essentially unknown to the nonacademic public for three decades after his death. Two events in 2003 suddenly catapulted Strauss's name into media notoriety. One was the discovery that some of his students who held influential positions in Washington had been advocates, and in some cases shapers, of the Bush administration's decision to launch a military invasion to overthrow the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq. The other was a broadside denunciation of Strauss issued by the lunatic-fringe political activist Lyndon Larouche (who also maintains that the world is governed by Jewish bankers and that Queen Elizabeth is a drug dealer). Considering its source, Larouche's attack proved amazingly influential in the mainstream media and even on Broadway because it fed conspiracy-theory explanations of George W. Bush's foreign policy among vehement opponents of that policy.

Thomas Pangle's concise but heavily annotated book is one of three serious studies (the others authored by Steven Smith of Yale and Michael and Catherine Zuckert of Notre Dame) published in 2006 that serve not only to refute the scandalous media misrepresentations of Strauss's thought, but to encourage and assist readers to grapple with Strauss's genuine, profound life-work. Pangle aims to provide “an accurate, brief, and nonpolemical introduction” to Strauss's work and legacy, and relies heavily on Strauss's own words to clarify his intention. He stresses the value of Strauss's writings both for helping to illuminate “the deeply problematic roots of the contemporary world” and for the assistance they offer in liberating us from “the peculiarly severe intellectual limitations” of our time (3, 126).

The four chapters of Pangle's book are devoted, respectively, to Strauss's challenge to the dominant, relativistic “liberal culture”; his revival of the serious study of classical political philosophy; his “rediscovery and reassessment” of the foundations of modernity; and his legacy in political science. In the first chapter, Pangle demonstrates, in response to those who represent Strauss as a “conservative” or “absolutist” opponent of liberalism, that Strauss was simply bringing out into the open and rethinking the roots of a crisis that was already present in twentieth-century liberal thought. Having renounced as incredible, or metaphysically restrictive, the original liberal doctrine of natural rights, contemporary liberals, exemplified by Isaiah Berlin, adopted the desperate strategy of trying to defend their position on relativistic grounds, simultaneously asking their audience to be liberals and acknowledging that such a position was not objectively or rationally superior to the alternatives.

Strauss's critique of liberalism, then, did not engender its crisis. Instead, being aware (as few of his mid-century American readers were) of the depth of the Nietzschean/Heideggerian historicist challenge to liberalism—the effects of which would increasingly be felt in this country in the decades to come—Strauss pointed out, most prominently in the introduction to his best-known book, Natural Right and History, that the liberal emperor was no longer wearing any clothes. The incipient intellectual crisis of our time necessitated an enterprise of philosophic archeology, designed to retrace the path that led to this situation so as to identify the alternatives to it. But even as Strauss called upon his students to reconsider “the idea of natural right,” Pangle emphasizes, he warned against the attempt (in Strauss's words) to embrace that doctrine “in a spirit of fanatical obscurantism,” rather than rationally weighing its meaning and validity (23). In fact, the true crisis of modern natural right reflected in Strauss's view not some loss of faith or moral defect but rather “the eruption into broad daylight” of the consequences of “the modern West's long-incubating self-doubts” (28). Hence Strauss's response to relativism was not the espousal of any sort of absolutism, but the resurrection of the original Socratic “zetetic skepticism” that aimed to open us to the fundamental human alternatives, rather than suppress them as historicism would do by denying the very possibility of the philosophic enterprise (32).

Pangle's chapter on Strauss's revival of classical political philosophy highlights two of its elements: its anti-utopian character (as Strauss demonstrated through his careful reading of Plato's Republic), reflecting the belief that there is an inevitable tension between philosophy and political society—hence the impossibility of a simply “rational” political regime; and Strauss's rediscovery of the technique of “esoteric writing” invented by the classical philosophers as a defensive response to the necessarily antiphilosophic character of the city. As Pangle observes, the sheer fact of Strauss's anti-utopian reading of the Republic rebuts the charge that he himself aimed somehow to synthesize philosophic wisdom with political power (47). Nor, Pangle points out, did Strauss's resurrection of classical philosophy entail a rejection of modern representative democracy, let alone a desire to restore the ancient polis: rather than being simply subject to Aristotle's critique of (direct) democracy, modern representative government in Strauss's view entails a synthesis of democracy with aristocracy (54, 76).

Pangle properly describes the continuing academic outrage at Strauss's rediscovery of esoteric writing as an “obscurantist” response on the part of conventional scholars whose enterprise of situating each thinker in his supposed historical context, limiting even the most profound thinkers to the status of prisoners of their time, would be exploded if Strauss were correct. It is incoherent, Pangle observes, for those scholars to denounce Strauss for supposedly disregarding historical context in his interpretations, when his entire hypothesis about esoteric writing depends on the awareness each philosopher needed to have of his context (59). And the hypothesis was just that: not a dogmatic interpretative rule, but a thought to be tested anew in the case of each author. No less “tentative or experimental” in Strauss's words was his entire “return” to classical political philosophy (68).

At the core of the modern politico-philosophic project according to Strauss, as Pangle discusses in his third chapter, was a “public-spirited dissatisfaction” at the classical philosophers' “lack of political ambition,” which had left political existence, as well as philosophy itself, vulnerable to theocracy. The modern endeavor to encompass the human essence on the basis of entirely worldly, nontranscendent rational standards grounded in fundamental human passions necessarily engendered its own radicalization, given its incapacity to achieve its aim (69–70) . Still, Pangle argues (in agreement with the Zuckerts), the first “wave” of modern thought—the greatest practical achievement of which was the American Constitution—proved to be clearly superior in its consequences, in Strauss's view, to the second and third waves respectively initiated by Rousseau and Nietzsche, which ultimately issued in twentieth-century totalitarianism. Far from rejecting modern liberal-constitutional republicanism on account of its defective theoretical roots, Strauss fully appreciated its practical virtues: the political justice and provision for social welfare made possible by the economic abundance that the liberation of acquisitiveness generates, and the freedom it offers for philosophy. Unlike the “progressive” critics of liberalism, Pangle observes, Strauss was not disposed “to speak contemptuously of the ‘bourgeoisie.’” And he recognized, as did Tocqueville, that an Aristotelian political science has much to learn from the modern “inventions” on which the American Founders relied. But the moderation engendered by his study of the ancient writers also taught Strauss the need to balance the twin elements of the American heritage—the classical/biblical tradition and modern individualism—rather than allow one strand to triumph. That same moderation entailed a liberation both from the delusion that the roots of international conflict can be made to disappear, and (pace Strauss's media critics) from “the temptations to imperial domination” and “self-righteousness” (74–79, 85–86).

Pangle's last chapter shows how the lessons Strauss drew from the classics engendered a civically responsible political science developed by many of his students. Strauss himself sought to restore an appreciation of the art of statesmanship, which can never be subsumed under any quasi-mathematical science, while also promoting an anti-utopian (but far from morally neutral) realism that would immunize his readers against the antiliberal “political fanaticism of the contemporary Left and Right” (82). Schooled by Strauss, an Aristotelian political scientist will strive to be neither a partisan nor a merely neutral scientific “observer,” but rather a public-spirited umpire among the conflicting claims of political partisans whose goal is moderation rather than ideological extremism (95–96).

Pangle proceeds to survey the remarkable variety of political-science investigations undertaken by scholars whom Strauss and his first generation of students influenced (not all of them professing “Straussians”). Strauss-inspired scholarship has provided a fuller appreciation of the thought and intentions of the American founders and of leading African-American statesmen, an articulation of the benefits and limits of economic analyses of public policy, and critical studies of contemporary political psychology and international-relations “theory.” It has also engendered studies of how the courts may properly exercise their power of Constitutional interpretation in a manner consistent with the principle of republican self-government, and how the president and career civil service can best serve their roles within the Constitutional system. At the same time, Pangle shows that far from being monolithic in their views, political scientists influenced by Strauss have often disagreed on these specific issues.

After highlighting the contribution that Strauss's insights made to the deepening of American political science, Pangle reminds us in his conclusion of the limits of political life as Strauss conceived it by comparison with the life of contemplation and its focus on the tension between reason and revelation (114–17). Despite its brevity, this book constitutes an invaluable contribution to the understanding of Leo Strauss's thought and an excellent starting point for appreciating the significance of his work for the study and practice of political life.