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The Strauss-Krüger Correspondence

Returning to Plato through Kant

  • Book
  • © 2018

Overview

Editors:
  1. Susan Meld Shell

    1. Department of Political Science, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA, USA

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  • Offers an accessible entry point to understanding the development of Leo Strauss' influential political philosophy
  • Presents the first translation of Leo Strauss' letters with Gerhard Krüger, a student of Heidegger and fellow modern Platonist, with commentary by leading Strauss scholars
  • Sheds new light on Leo Strauss' connection with the Kantian tradition
  • Casts new and important light on the broader question of the conflict between reason and revelation, as well as the possibility of a philosophical theology relevant to the present
  • Focuses on an exceptionally fraught period of 20th century political and intellectual European history

Part of the book series: Recovering Political Philosophy (REPOPH)

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Table of contents (9 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xii
    Download chapter PDF

  2. Editor’s Introduction

    • Susan M. Shell
    Pages 1-11

  3. Leo Strauss: Gerhard Krüger Correspondence 1928–1962

    • Jerome Veith, Anna Schmidt, Susan M. Shell
    Pages 13-88

  4. The Light Shed on the Crucial Development of Strauss’s Thought by His Correspondence with Gerhard Krüger

    • Thomas L. Pangle
    Pages 89-103

  5. The Example of Socrates: The Correspondence Between Leo Strauss and Gerhard Krüger

    • David Janssens
    Pages 105-123

  6. “Zurück zu Plato!” But, Which Plato?: The Return to Plato by Gerhard Krüger and Leo Strauss

    • Daniel Tanguay
    Pages 125-142

  7. Moral Finitude and Ontology of Creation: The Kantian Interpretation of Gerhard Krüger

    • Luc Langlois
    Pages 143-164

  8. Gerhard Krüger and Leo Strauss: The Kant Motif

    • Susan M. Shell
    Pages 165-179

  9. Natural Right and Historical Consciousness in Strauss and Krüger’s Exchange

    • Alberto Ghibellini
    Pages 181-198

  10. History and Modernity in the Strauss-Krüger Correspondence

    • Richard Velkley
    Pages 199-218

  11. Back Matter

    Pages 219-237
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Keywords

About this book

This book presents the first full translation of the correspondence of Leo Strauss and Gerhard Krüger, showing for each the development of key and influential ideas, along with seven interpretative essays by leading Strauss scholars. During the early to mid-1930’s, Leo Strauss carried on an intense, and sometimes deeply personal, correspondence with one of the leading intellectual lights among Heidegger’s circle of recent students and younger associates. A fellow traveler in the effort to “return to Plato” and reject neo-Kantian conventions of the day, Krüger was also a serious student of Rudolf Bultmann and the neo-orthodox movement in which Strauss also took an early interest. During the most intense years of their correspondence, each underwent significant intellectual development: in Krüger’s case, through a penetrating series of studies of Kant and Descartes, respectively, ultimately leading to Krüger’s conversion to Catholicism; and, in Strauss’s case, through the complex stagesof what he subsequently called his “reorientation,” involving what he for the first time calls “political philosophy.” Readers interested in tracing the development of Strauss’s thoughts regarding a theological alternative that he found helpfully challenging—if not ultimately compelling—will find this correspondence to be an accessible point of entry.

Editors and Affiliations

  • Department of Political Science, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA, USA

    Susan Meld Shell

About the editor

Susan M. Shell is Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Boston College, USA. She is the author of Kant and the Limits of Autonomy (2009), The Embodiment of Reason: Kant on Spirit, Generation and Community (1996), The Rights of Reason: A Study of Kant's Philosophy and Politics (1980). She is also the co-editor (with Robert Faulkner) of America at Risk: Threats to Liberal Self-Government in an Age of Uncertainty (2009). 

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