"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.
Über den Autor Leo Strauss
Leo Strauss, geb. 1899 in Kirchhain/Hessen, gest. 1973 in Annapolis/Maryland, wurde 1921 von Cassirer in Hamburg promoviert. Anschließend Studien bei Husserl und Heidegger in Freiburg. 1925-1932 Mitarbeiter der Akademie für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin. Nach Forschungsaufenthalten in Paris und Cambridge 1938 Übersiedlung in die USA. Professor an der New School for Social Research, New York. 1949 Ruf an die University of Chicago, die während der zwei Jahrzehnte seiner Lehr- und Forschungstätigkeit zum wichtigsten Ort der Neubelebung der Politischen Philosophie wird.