"The City and Man" consists of provocative essays by the late Leo Strauss on Aristotle's "Politics," Plato's "Republic," and Thucydides' "Peloponnesian Wars." Together, the essays constitute a brilliant attempt to use classical political philosophy as a means of liberating modern political philosophy from the stranglehold of ideology. The essays are based on a long and intimate familiarity with the works, but the essay on Aristotle is especially important as one of Strauss's few writings on the philosopher who largely shaped Strauss's conception of antiquity. The essay on Plato is a full-scale discussion of Platonic political philosophy, wide in scope yet compact in execution. When discussing Thucydides, Strauss succeeds not only in presenting the historian as a moral thinker of high rank, but in drawing his thought into the orbit of philosophy, and thus indicating a relation of history and philosophy that does not presuppose the absorption of philosophy by history.
Biografie
Leo Strauss, geb. 1899 in Kirchhain/ Hessen, gest. 1973 in Annapolis/Maryland. 1921 Promotion bei Cassirer in Hamburg, anschließend Studien bei Husserl und Heidegger in Freiburg. 1932-34 Rockefeller Stipendiat in Paris und Cambridge. Hobbes-Forschungen in England. 1938 Übersiedlung in die USA. Lehre an der New School for Social Research in New York. 1949 Ruf als Professor für Politische Philosophie an die University of Chicago, die während der zwei Jahrzehnte seiner Lehr- und Forschungstätigkeit zum wichtigsten Ort der Neubelebung der Politischen Philosophie wird.
