Leo Strauss is said to have kept a picture of himself on his desk. Hailing from his days as a young soldier, it symbolized his vocation as a fighter against dogma. That vocation resulted in a polemical style of thinking that turned him equally against skeptics, believers, atheists, conservatives, and liberals, leaving his readers confused about his true intentions, incapable of rising to the insight that he was perhaps a philosopher. Despite the opacity of his intentions, Strauss’s works have been profitably read by scholars of varied persuasions—from Claude Lefort to Carl Schmitt to Willmoore Kendall. The two books under review are part of that reception, which reflects Strauss’s antidogmatic self-understanding.

Laurence Lampert and Grant N. Havers offer contrasting interpretations of Strauss’s enduring importance. Lampert reads Strauss as the rediscoverer of an ancient art of writing which holds the key to a new history of philosophy. The gist of the argument is the controversial view—which is more and more widely accepted, notably in recent work on Machiavelli (Erica Brenner) and Nietzsche (Maudemarie Clark and David Dudrick)—that the great philosophers wrote exoterically, indicating their true teaching between the lines. What Lampert adds, his own enduring contribution, is a powerful argument supported by a wealth of evidence. Beginning with “Strauss’s Recovery of Exotericism” (Part I), a thrilling account of Strauss’s 1938/9 correspondence with Jacob Klein detailing his discovery of exoteric writing in Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Maimonides, Lampert’s argument follows the arc of Western thought, from “The Socratic Enlightenment” (Part II) to “The Modern Enlightenment” (Part III). Each part consists of expert and original readings of Strauss’s pivotal works, from the 1935 “Introduction” to Philosophy and Law to “What Is Political Philosophy?” (1954) to the final “Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil,” written in 1973.

Perhaps the most striking evidence of exoteric writing comes from Strauss himself. To judge from his correspondence, Strauss held rather different—even opposite—views from what his writings suggest (cf. pp. 17, 90). Thus, for example, ancient “gentlemanship” (kalokagathia) is not, or not only, the model to which the politically gifted should aspire. It was also a “swear word” in the Socratic circle—hence, presumably, something to be avoided: in Strauss’s words, “something like ‘philistine’ or ‘bourgeois’ in the nineteenth century” (letter to Jacob Klein, February 16, 1939, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3, p. 568). Similarly, the life guided by divine revelation is not a serious alternative for philosophers (p. 50). Strauss’s praise of the political and religious lives is rather exoteric—part of a long tradition of “politics for philosophy” (p. 114), which extends from Socrates’ rhetorical construction of a “teleotheology” to Nietzsche’s invocation of new gods divinizing earthly life.

Although the subtlety of Lampert’s argument cannot be conveyed here, its effect is to challenge the Heideggerian account of Western thought as an “ontotheological” destining, in which the very attempt to understand what entities truly are (ontology) generates a corresponding conception of the highest entity that best embodies that truth (theology). Against this view, Lampert suggests that already the first “teleotheology,” which established the rule of Platonic “ideas,” was a deliberate philosophical-political project. Ever since then, Platonic political philosophers have sought to advance “the simply highest and best”— philosophic knowledge of the True—through “the common highest and best”—religion and morality. As part of this tradition, Strauss’s own teleotheology of natural kinds, which ranks “the philosopher” above “the gentleman” and “the vulgar,” Lampert implies, must be understood as exoteric. If Straussians still believe in a natural order of eternal kinds, this is because Strauss misjudged the spiritual situation of the present (cf. p. 72). It is simply no longer prudent or wise to arm students with a conception of the whole that demands ignorance of modern natural science (pp. 204, 233).

The Enduring Importance of Leo Strauss poses a serious challenge to readers of Strauss who have long sought to understand his philosophic position. In Lampert’s reading, Strauss was—or became—ultimately a Nietzschean (cf. pp. 215, 269). He was also a new kind of antihistoricist historian, who undermined the dogma that truth is “socially” or “historically” constructed. Indeed, reading Lampert’s superb chapters on Xenophon, one cannot fail to wonder how Xenophon’s freedom of thought, as displayed in his art of writing, may have exceeded ours despite—or rather because—of the modern imperative to “always historicize!” If it turns out to be true that philosophers were able to bracket or suspend the prejudices of their times to let the phenomena show themselves from themselves, then their thought may contain an unexplored wealth of subversive insights (cf. pp. 126, 171, 184, 234). That holds true of Strauss himself, in whom Lampert finds resources for developing seemingly anti-Straussian arguments concerning the “logical link between monotheism and inhuman actions” and the necessity of a “comprehensive ecological way of thinking and acting” that is also sensitive to difference (pp. 236, 300, 308).

This is most exciting and enlightening, I believe. Lampert may prove Hans-Georg Gadamer right that to understand at all (in this case, Strauss) is to understand (him) differently. It is therefore puzzling to find the ontological pluralism and perspectivism presupposed in Lampert’s argument (cf. p. 34)—which is also consistent with his two main sources, Strauss and Nietzsche—undermined by the thesis that there is one Great Tradition of philosophy united by its insight into “the True” (pp. 279, 288). As the recent work of Richard Velkley suggests, rather than beginning from a Nietzsche that is often indistinguishable from Kant (pp. 99, 148, 209, 281, 303), Strauss began from Husserl and Heidegger as retrievers of the Aristotelian question of being (cf. pp. 191, 34). Accordingly, the ultimate “ground” of his thought, I would argue, were the phenomena themselves, which may be interpreted for “conservative” ends—for example, the evidence that there are “gentlemen” concerned with honor and “vulgar” beings concerned with gain—as well as for subversive ends—for example, the evidence that nature is becoming, erotic striving, or will to power (cf. pp. 142, 280).

Havers’s is a different Strauss, whose enduring importance is political (p. 66). Strauss made it possible to support the cause of “Anglo-American democracy” on grounds that transcend it, famously, on “classical” natural right. Against his “leftist” critics, Havers argues that Strauss’s efforts to this effect were sincere (pp. 14, 21). Indeed, as Havers persuasively shows, Strauss had a “lifelong interest in defining what is universal” (p. 30) and in defending “the classical teaching that by nature all human beings can understand the good” (p. 134). And yet—this being the core thesis of Leo Strauss and Anglo-American Democracy—Strauss’s universalism does more harm than good (pp. 14–15). It fuels a neoconservative ideology of global democracy building; it glorifies an ancient past that was anything but humane; and it undermines the true foundations of Anglo-American democracy, which are historicist—specifically, English—and, above all, Christian-Protestant (pp. 16, 59, 168).

In six densely researched chapters, Havers shows how Strauss’s thought supports political views that range from right to left. Against the widespread view that Strauss was a conservative, Havers argues that he was, in key respects, an egalitarian (since the good is in principle intelligible to all) and even a “leftist” (pp. 38 f., 131). Thus, his thought disarms the value neutrality of modern rationalism following the “hermeneutics of suspicion” of Marx, Nietzsche, or Freud and exposes the pseudo-Christian foundations of modern liberalism as “bourgeois” ideology (cf. pp. 86, 163, 77, 69). This is meant as a warning to conservatives who have found an ally in Strauss (pp. 123, 139). To this end, Havers deploys his own hermeneutics of suspicion to cast doubt on the foundations of Straussian thought. Exposing the tensions (and absurdities) inherent in the attempt to hellenize the American founding, Havers argues that Straussians have been driven by a love of abstractions—for example, Churchill as “pagan warrior”; the (oxymoronic) “Christian gentleman” as model—that fly in the face of historical knowledge (p. 120).

Like Lampert, Havers draws on Strauss to critique Straussianism. In contrast to his followers, who think they can (and must) appeal to Aristotle in their fight against both slavery and abortion, Strauss had a keen sense of the conflicting claims of religion, politics, and morality (cf. pp. 58, 154). He also understood, with Nietzsche—and Jürgen Habermas—that the quasi-religious utopianism of progressive politics cannot ignore its roots in the Judeo-Christian heritage (pp. 165, 161). Yet, against Strauss, Havers does not seek to preserve that heritage as a challenge to rational thought but as an essential and irreplaceable “leavening influence” on politics and society (pp. 10, 168).

Readers of Havers will be right to suspect, or dismiss, a defense of the Anglo-American-Christian West that is as sharply critical of historical abstractions as it is proud of its own. But Havers succeeds in a way that is less grand, and more useful: to provide one of the most thorough critiques to date of the political uses and abuses of Strauss’s thought.