Anne Norton's book combines analysis of texts, which can be checked, with oral history or gossip, which cannot. Norton also shares her opinions and judgments about U.S. foreign policy. The mixed nature of the book makes for a difficult academic review.

The first paragraph establishes the author's credentials as a student of a student of Leo Strauss, a “political philosopher” (p. 5). She also knows “many Straussians and some of the students of Strauss” (p. ix). The distinction between Strauss and his pupils, and Straussians, is important; Norton repeats it several times. Straussians are epigones, which she takes to be “followers and toadies” associated with disagreeable forms of life—flies, fleas, and lice (p. 24). Even though ideological labels such as liberal and conservative (according to Strauss) conflict with the aspirations of political philosophy, Norton makes a plausible case that Strauss might be called a “conservative” in a vague Burkean sort of way. The neoconservative Straussians, in contrast, rejoice in being revolutionaries, big-government people without manners or courtesy. Animated by fear, they are captivated by the “allure of empire” (pp. 161–80).

In light of these remarks, I must note that I am not now, nor have I ever been, a Straussian or a pupil of Strauss or of his pupils. I confess to knowing several Straussians named in this book and count a few friends among their number.

Norton wrote the book “because I have debts to pay and ghosts to lay, and because I was made, somewhat against my will, the carrier of an oral history” (p. ix). She does not say to whom the debts were owed, though she does discuss the debts owed by Socrates and by Strauss (pp. 218–19). She does not describe the ghost nor indicate how she will lay it to rest. She indicates that she valued the “stories” she was told and the pleasure she took in being favored by her teachers to listen to them. Indeed, much of the book consists in fascinating tales. Other reviewers (Clifford Orwin, for example, in The Claremont Review of Books 5 [no. 4, Spring 2005]: 14–16) have disputed their truth, but that is another story.

Norton concludes with a discussion of Strauss and Abu Al-Nasr Al-Farabi and Baghdad, where Farabi taught. Because of the large U.S. garrison in Iraq and “because the Straussians are prominent among those who govern,” this coincidence has great significance, which makes her recollection of her academic formation, including the stories, “no longer part of a curious personal history but elements of a common legacy.” Finally, her remembrance of things past brought to her mind “the shapes of two futures” (p. xi). Thus, her intention is to combine: 1) a personal memoir, chiefly of graduate school, 2) an analysis of the later careers of some of her former classmates and teachers, and 3) the fate of the nation.

The argument Norton makes is that Strauss the political philosopher was betrayed by the Straussians who then turned America into a “moral battleground” (p. 2). The Straussians employ the language used by Strauss, but in fact misuse it because they have forgotten (or perhaps never knew) the Socratic questions at the heart of political philosophy. In place of the “pure and whole questioning” of Strauss, they have found “safer if more suspect certainties” (p. 76).

Some of the book is intellectual history. She discusses, for example, the personal and philosophical relationship between Strauss and Hannah Arendt, and the complex connection they both had to Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, and especially the latter's “concept of the political.” As many other studies have argued, their relations with Heidegger were personally and philosophically intense. With respect to a similar intensity regarding politics, the case is less easily made. According to Norton, Schmitt “shaped the term,” namely “the political,” for each of them and for their students (pp. 39–41). Unfortunately, there are no citations given to the appropriate texts and none of Arendt's students is named. In any case, the term was used by Hegel and is present in the distinction between ta politika (polis-affairs) and to politikon (the political) in Herodotus (VI, 57), Plato (Laws, 757c-e) and Aristotle (Politics, 1253b19).

Norton has critical remarks to make about Leon Kass (on biotechnology and bioethics), about Carnes Lord (concerning strategy), and about Tom Pangle (regarding his hiding his real meaning in plain sight). She also uses intense language to describe “Straussian truth-squads” and “intellectual brownshirts” (p. 45) roaming the halls of the University of Chicago intimidating cowardly professors. Whoever these unnamed bullies were, it sounds serious. It turns out, however, that they were only “mocking behavioralists” and rejecting “the claims of science to ethical neutrality” (p. 46).

The author's sharpest criticism is directed at Allan Bloom, who “taught both the most powerful and the most vociferously ideological of the Straussians,” and at his famous 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind (pp. 58 ff). Again, some remarks are intellectually engaging—her criticism of Bloom's interpretation of Flaubert's Madame Bovary, for example (pp. 65–66). Her attribution of motives to Bloom for writing Closing, chiefly ressentiment, are less defensible. She says nothing about his translations of Plato and Rousseau or of his time in Toronto.

When Norton turns her attention to the conduct of U.S. foreign policy, which she understands as analogous to the Sicilian Expedition described by Thucydides, her confident judgments are both dated and intrinsically questionable. She tries, for instance, to turn the Straussian neoconservatives into a mirror image of the jihadist terrorists by drawing on alleged similarities between Strauss's reservations about liberal democracy and the opinions of Sayyid Qtub (pp. 109–13). She thinks that the capacity of Americans to endure violence “has gone below zero” (p. 157). The fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq indicates otherwise.

Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire is not a book without humor, however. Norton's description of the Last Man—or rather, of the Last Kids and the Last Dog—is quite funny (p. 124). Her view of Churchill restores balance to the uncritical way that many Americans view him. On the other hand, her discussion of the debate between Strauss and Alexandre Kojève (pp. 147–48), which seems to imply agreement regarding the Universal and Homogeneous State, is simply wrong. In short, like most books, this one is uneven. Unlike most uneven books, however, its exasperating features are unredeemed by significant insights.