The City and Man [Paperback]

Leo Strauss (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0226777014 | ISBN-13: 978-0226777016 | Publication Date: November 15, 1978

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.

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About the Author

Leo Strauss (1899-1973) was born and educated in Germany, receiving his doctorate from Hamburg University in 1921. He came to the United States in 1938 and taught political science and philosophy at the New School for Social Research for a decade. He joined the faculty of the University of Chicago as professor of political philosophy in 1949 and was eventually named Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor. Among his many books are The Political Philosophy of Hobbes; Natural Right and History; and Thoughts on Machiavelli, all of which are available from the University of Chicago Press.

Product Details

• Paperback: 254 pages
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press (November 15, 1978)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226777014
• ISBN-13: 978-0226777016
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.8 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #214,884 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

46 of 55 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Two Types of Reason, Two Types of Justice, July 23, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The City and Man (Paperback)

Leo Strauss was generally uderstood to be an originator of the scholarly opinion that Plato wrote esoterically, and Plato's dialogue on justice, "The Republic" has an exoteric message (to the outsiders) and an esoteric message (to the insiders). In 'City and Man' Strauss carefully, elegantly, systematically crafts the arguement by comparing and contrasting a historian, a philospher and finally a poltical scientist. In this neat way of using real men's works, in their historical context, the careful reader can come to appreciate why it was necessary for Plato to write esoterically and why it is consistent with Justice, or say Nature. Easily, yet strikingly, Strauss leads one through the birth of political philosophy, as a political-philosophy, not as a philosophical study of things political. P.S. I love this book.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Review Originally Posted in Goodreads, September 23, 2009

By 

M. Sasiain (Denver, CO) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The City and Man (Paperback)

Wow. All I can say is "wow, what a read." For an author that seemingly dislikes the use of paragraphs, Strauss' books are in the small minority of dense reads that I find worth the time to struggle through. He is/was an extremely intelligent man who, fun for us, or maybe just fun for me, writes in code; Strauss' works are, as he may say, a "silent instruction." The City and Man is certainly no exception to this rule.

Don't like philosophical spoilers? Then stop reading this review because the following are, in my view, a few code breakers for interpreting this Straussian text. I'll keep it somewhat brief.

NOMOS: Nomos is conventional, relative truth; a fabricated, normative reality. Even when not explicitly using this word (i.e. the picture in a frame) Strauss is always talking about nomos within his tacit instruction (i.e. the frame around the picture). Through mental constructs, our perception is overlaid with the markings of cultural values, beliefs, ideals, nationalities, habits, lines of thinking, and ways of proceeding. Perception is distorted in accordance with conditioning. First there is a cognition, THEN a cognitive distortion. The `city' overwhelms `nature'. Personally, my ears perk up whenever someone uses the phrase "the real world."

NATURE: Awareness. Simple as that. Awareness precedes thought and hence can't be captured by the modality of thought and other mental phenomena. Before the advent of the city, our natural state (awareness) lies free of values and judgments -On a side note the contemplative practice of meditation may assist us in experientially seeing this. Moreover nature is the `whole', the whole phenomenal world that is. Reminiscent of eastern and Gnostic philosophies, we are the world and the world is us. We lie in ourselves and fail to realize it because we alienate ourselves from ourselves (consciousness becomes fragmented within itself through abstract categories and interpretive schemas).

POLITICS: The interaction between people. But as far as rhetoric is concerned it is the manipulation of nomos for specific consequences. By fashioning mental artifacts that shape and organize experience into specified constellations, philosophers persuade the masses through their mouthpieces that are the politicians. However, those that have broken free from this mental-social immersion (Plato's Cave) are no longer influenced by these political games and are thus free to participate in the further propagation of myths, stand aloof, or divulge this information in the attempt to liberate others. To be just or unjust is the question...or maybe this is a false, dualistic dilemma. After all the entire normative landscape, by being grounded in fiction, is specious to begin with.

RANDOM BITS AND PIECES: Every now and then Strauss throws in a random chunky paragraph or `misplaced' sentence that provides contextual clues. Duly note these clues because their counterparts will most likely appear, indirectly of course, ten or twenty pages down the road. Given these hints we must rotate the text and unlock their true meaning much like a Rubik's Cube. Although I won't quote specific passages I do, however, remember that certain intimations are made: That enlightenment itself is not a myth, that those who Know Themselves are truly wise, and towards the end Strauss even ends with the question Quid Sit Deus (What is God?). In other words, what IS the phenomenal world? From WHENCE do phenomena emerge and fall away to? What is our true nature or, more specifically, who am I, REALLY, once all the constructions and interpretations that I surround myself with have been stripped away?

The eye will never see itself.

83 of 123 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Strauss vs. the "Straussians"?, February 24, 2004

By 

David H Miller "rothbardianphysicist" (Sacramento, California) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The City and Man (Paperback)

"The City and Man" consists of three lectures by the famed -- and controversial -- political theorist Leo Strauss: he offers commentaries on Aristotle's "Politics," on Plato's "Republic," and on Thucydides' "History of the Peloponnesian War."

Strauss, who was during his life an obscure professor at the University of Chicago, has recently achieved posthumous fame because a number of his alleged disciples, so-called "Straussians," were among the neoconservatives who conceived and implemented the recent disastrous American conquest of Iraq.

His writings have therefore acquired new interest because of the insight they may provide into the thinking of those who have attempted to create a new American imperium.

Strauss is renowned for his verbosity, for a bizarre numerological fixation on the ancient texts he studied, and for a belief in "esotericism" -- i.e., that the classic authors hid their real teachings in cryptic subtexts discernible only by the most probing of readers.

"The City and Man" definitely exhibits Strauss' verbosity -- it is appropriate bedtime reading only if one needs a cure for insomnia. There is, however, little evidence of Strauss' numerological fetish -- he does at one point allude to a certain numerical symmetry in the structure of Plato's "Republic" based on a two-one-two pattern in the number of Socrates' "interlocutors," but the point is of the sort that any literary critic might make.

And to the degree that Strauss attributes "esoteric" doctrines to his authors in this book, it is again such as any literary critic might suggest -- e.g., he repeatedly suggests that certain characters are intended to illustrate certain ideal types or that the presentation is structured so as to emphasize certain key themes.

The primary conclusion reached in Strauss's first and briefest essay, on Aristotle's "Politics," is uncontroversial: the "guiding question of Aristotle's 'Politics' is the question of the best regime." Aristotle was a "partisan of excellence." However, Strauss further adds, a "difficulty arises from the fact that the highest end of the individual is contemplation." Because the mass of men, unlike Aristotle, are incapable of a fully contemplative life, Strauss claims "that there are examples of men of the highest excellence whereas there are no examples of cities of the highest excellence..." This introduces a theme, which occurs throughout Strauss' work, of the conflict between a life devoted to the pursuit of wisdom and the demands of civil and political life.

Strauss sharpens this point in his longer essay on Plato's "Republic." After explaining in detail Plato's ideal of the philosopher-king, Strauss reveals that the deepest impracticality in Plato's scheme is "the philosophers' unwillingness to rule...Why are the philosophers unwilling to rule? Being dominated by the desire...for knowledge as the one thing needful...the philosophers have no desire for looking down at human affairs, let alone for taking care of them."

It is Strauss' longest and final essay, on Thucydides' history of the brutal war which ended the classical period in Greece, which speaks most directly to our own current condition. Strauss declares that in wartime "manners become altogether depraved...The decay in speech and in deed of moderation is accompanied by the decay of respect for law...a good regime...is averse to war and will avoid every war which can be avoided."

Unfortunately, Strauss argues, democracy leads to imperialism and war: "empire...is not possible without the full participation of the demos [i.e., the democratic mass electorate, what is now called "the people"] in political life; the demos is enthusiastically in favor of the grandest imperial enterprise..."

In the end Strauss condemns "Athenian imperialism," the ultimate cause of the horrifying war, not for its narrow and self-seeking side (which he shows did exist) but rather for its "fantastic political universalism." The Athenians were gripped by a naive utopian belief that culture, enlightenment, and democracy could be exported via military might.

Strauss argues that, rather than "sham universalism" based on military conquest, the only proper form of universalism is "the universalism of thought," the peaceful and non-violent spread of enlightenment through cultural interaction.

In light of Strauss' own arguments, what are we to make of the neoconservative "Straussians" who have brought about the American military conquest of Iraq in order to "liberate" the Iraqi people?

Far from being wise men who wished to avoid the demands of political power, they have struggled and schemed to gain power. They have certainly not, in Strauss' words, avoided "every war which can be avoided"; indeed, they fabricated false stories of "weapons of mass destruction" in order to engineer a preemptive attack. As Strauss predicted, "The decay in speech and in deed of moderation is accompanied by the decay of respect for law..." The decay of respect for law has resulted in grotesque violations of the American Constitution -- the arbitrary denial of habeas corpus, the USA Patriot Act, etc. And there is no secret that all of this is motivated by, as Strauss says, a "fantastic political universalism," the belief that America can and should impose, by force of arms, its own system of "democratic capitalism" not only on the Iraqi people but on the entire world, whether the rest of the world wants it or not.

In short, the neoconservative "Straussians" are the people Strauss warned us about in "The City and Man." They are "Straussians" in name only. In fact, they are the cruel idealists, the humanitarians with a guillotine, who destroy civilization in the name of advancing it. We saw their kind in ancient Athens, in revolutionary France, in Bolshevik Russia, in Maoist China, and, now, in contemporary America.

As Leo Strauss so ably demonstrates in "The City and Man," they are not conservatives; they are nihilists.

Because of Strauss' Teutonic style, his pedantic focus on detail, and his sheer verbosity, "The City and Man" is not easy reading. But, in "The City and Man," Strauss does offer us a timely warning of the horrifying abyss towards which we ourselves are now hurtling.