Leo Strauss and American Democracy: A Response to Wood and Holmes
Although Leo Strauss spent the better part of his scholarly career in the United States, his name remained essentially unknown in this country during his lifetime outside the rather restricted academic circles of political science and Judaic studies. Only in recent years — owing, positively, to the best-selling status achieved by a book by one of his students, Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind; and negatively, to several critical reviews of his thought and influence in the semi-popular media —has Strauss's name been publicized to a somewhat wider audience. This article is a response to two of the critiques: Gordon Wood's relatively moderate “The Fundamentalists and the Constitution,” published in the New York Review of Books (18 February 1988), and Stephen Taylor Holmes's less restrained “Truths for Philosophers Alone?”, which appeared in the Times Literary Supplement (1–7 December 1989)
Select Documents Illustrative of the History of the United States, I776-I86I. Edited with Notes by WILLIAM MACDONALD, Professor of History and Political Science in Bowdoin College. Pp. xiii, 465. Price, $2.25. New York and London: The Macmillan Company, I898
