Leo Strauss’s Natural Right and History (w/ Matt Dinan)

Pull up a chair and pour yourself a drink! For the third installment in our occasional series on important conservative books, or important books written by or embraced by conservatives, we take up Leo Strauss’s Natural Right and History, based on his 1949 Walgreen Lectures at the University of Chicago (where he taught for two decades) and published in 1953. To help us, we called on our friend Matt Dinan, a political theorist who’s associate professor in the Great Books Program at St. Thomas University in New Brunswick, Canada. If you’ve listened to previous episodes and wanted us to go deeper on Leo Strauss, the German-Jewish political philosopher who came to the United States after fleeing Nazism, “Straussianism,” and what they might have to do with American conservatism and our present political moment, here you go.
After offering some background on Strauss and the context of Natural Right and History’s publication, we discuss Strauss’s patriotic appeal to Americans in the book’s introduction, walk listeners through the chapters that follow (explaining what “natural right” is and why it’s paired with “history” in the title along the way), and close out by exploring Strauss’s ambiguous relationship to American conservatism—and more!
Sources:
Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (1953)
— On Tyranny (1963)
— Spinoza’s Critique of Religion (1965)
Harry V. Jaffa, Thomism and Aristotelianism: A Study of the Commentary by Thomas Aquinas on the Nicomachean Ethics (1952)
James W. Ceaser, “The American Context of Leo Strauss’s Natural Right and History,” Perspectives on Political Science, Spring 2008
Richard Velkley, Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy: On Original Forgetting (2011)
— “On the Roots of Rationalism: Strauss’s ‘Natural Right and History’ as Response to Heidegger,” The Review of Politics, Spring 2008
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