In a review of Robert Howse’s Leo Strauss: Man of Peace, Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft remarks on how the author “defends Strauss against his caricature as a ‘cult figure of the right'”:
Howse’s “man of peace” discussion involves two central, intertwined claims: first, that Strauss was not a foe of liberalism, constitutionalism, or democracy, as he is commonly taken to be. Howse’s Strauss looks beyond the limiting polarization of liberalism and anti-liberalism, is willing to support constitutional democracy (just as the historical Strauss was, of course, happy to live within the constitutional democracy of the United States), and asks how philosophers might contribute to constitutional thought. …
Howse’s other claim is biographical: he argues that we should see Strauss’s development in terms of t’shuvah (Hebrew for “repentance”) performed for the youthful sin of illiberal and nihilistic thinking: he calls this “Strauss’s self-overcoming of anti-liberalism,” a form of surrogate repentance not through religious piety but by philosophical means. Strauss came to recognize, Howse argues, that his early attraction to the thought of Schmitt and Heidegger had been a youthful error, and all his subsequent projects must be understood as a slow arc of reorientation. Strauss’s persistent contemplation of non-liberal positions throughout his career — up to and including his study of Machiavelli, of which Howse is a very sensitive reader — was never an endorsement of those positions. It was driven by a need to tarry with the negative, to take critical distance from it, and then assume more moderate political and philosophical stances. For Howse’s Strauss, pre-modern political thought was not a source of authority but rather of “critical distance toward the present.”
The Dish 