Tag: Leo Strauss

2,981 words

Carl Schmitt, 1888–1985

The political regime under which much of the world labours (and the entire Western world) is called “Liberal Democracy.” Francis Fukuyama has praised the ever widening expansion of this regime over the globe as “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and [it consists in] the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”[1] The source of Fukuyama’s thesis, the Russian Hegelian Marxist, Alexandre Kojève, called this End State the “universal and homogeneous state”: it is the ultimate goal of both Liberalism and Communism.  (more…)

2,992 words

Part 1 of 3 (Part 2 here)

“What [Walter Moses] calls ‘political’ is the political in the ancient sense of the word, rather than in the modern sense that is relevant for us. What is hidden behind this absolute negation of the sphere of the ‘private’ is not a modern Leviathan, but rather its pagan-fascist counterpart . . .”

—Leo Strauss, 1923[1]

(more…)

8,150 words

Czech version here

Leo Strauss, 1899–1973

Author’s Note:

I wrote the following essay in the 1990s while in graduate school. It was not written for a class, but merely to clarify my thinking on how to read philosophical texts in anticipation of writing my doctoral dissertation. (more…)