Cambridge Companion To Leo Strauss, The

Each volume of this series of companions to major philosophers and philosophies contains specially commissioned essays by an international team of scholars, together with a substantial bibliography, and will serve as a reference work for students and nonspecialists. One aim of the series is to dispel the intimidation such readers feel when faced with the work of a difficult and challenging subject. Leo Strauss was a central figure in the twentieth-century renaissance of political philosophy. The essays of The Cambridge Companion to Leo Strauss provide a comprehensive and nonpartisan survey of the major themes and problems that animated Strauss's work. These include his revival of the great "quarrel between the ancients and the moderns," his examination of the tension between Jerusalem and Athens, and, most controversially, his recovery of the tradition of esoteric writing. The volume also examines Strauss's complex relation to a range of contemporary political movements and thinkers, including Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Gershom Scholem, as well as the creation of a distinctive school of "Straussian" political philosophy.